


A Stitch in Time

by Anonymous



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Dad!Cloud, Fix-It, M/M, Time Travel, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-12
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-17 02:47:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 38,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29092992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Zack had a theory as to why Cloud was yanked back in time.  Cloud just happened to mess up Gaia’s plan the first chance he got.
Relationships: Zack Fair/Cloud Strife
Comments: 4
Kudos: 20
Collections: Five Figure Fanwork Exchange 2020





	1. Twist of Fate

**Author's Note:**

  * For [defragmentise (croixsouillees)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/croixsouillees/gifts).



Fenrir glided along the abandoned streets, its guttural purr bouncing off concrete slabs and the sides of derelict buildings. Early morning mist formed banks of fog along the cracked road, and the black motorcycle cut through them, leaving a billowing, swirling trail in its wake. Above the ruined city, the last stars glinted in the purple predawn light.

Denzel huddled closer against Cloud’s back, hiding from the morning chill. Cloud let one of his hands fall from Fenrir’s handlebar, wrapping it over one of the smaller ones clinging to him. It reminded him of finding the boy and bringing him home to Seventh Heaven. Back then, Denzel’s hands had shook from fever and weakness. The tremor in his small fingers now was only from windchill.

He felt kind of bad getting the boy up so early, but the church would have its first visitors by mid-morning, and he didn’t want to deal with them. Strangers who thought they knew him from his involvement with AVALANCHE, the WRO, and his fights against Sephiroth. Or, worse, saw him as a SOLDIER and a remnant of Shinra. 

He didn’t resent the pilgrims for wanting to come to the wellspring at Aerith’s church. Old, ill, broken, and hopeful, they came from all over Gaia to find peace and healing here. Just like he had. He couldn’t begrudge them that, even if it meant sharing his sanctuary.

He brought Fenrir to a stop several yards from the crumbling stone building’s wooden doors. Behind him, Denzel perked up and slid from the bike. The morning cold hit Cloud’s back and he held back a shiver as he pressed the release for the bike’s side compartments, unfolding them like wings.

The six blades inside went into the harness on his back, and he pulled out a satchel full of empty glass vials that clinked together delicately as he lifted the bag’s strap over his head, arranging it so it didn’t bother his neck. The sound of hands rubbing fiercely together caused him to look over at Denzel, who was blowing warm air into his cupped hands as he waited for Cloud at the top of the steps.

His lips twitched into the faintest of fond smiles. “You could have stayed home and waited for me to get back.”

Denzel shook his head obstinately, his mop of brown hair swishing with the motion. “You promised I could spend the whole day with you.”

“Guess I did.” He joined the boy at the doors. “I’m gonna leave you here for a little while though. Reeve asked me to clear out some monsters that are rumored to be in the area.” Likely, the creatures had been drawn in by the number of old and ill who came to the church.

Denzel looked up at him with a mixture of disappointment and awe. From anyone else, it would make him uncomfortable. Still did, with Denzel, but to a lesser degree. 

“Are you going to be gone long?”

Cloud shook his head as he pushed open the heavy doors. “Shouldn’t take too long, just a sweep of the area. An hour, maybe.”

A grin spread across Denzel’s face. “Alright,” he beamed before running down the aisle to the pool of clear water at the far end.

Still on the threshold, Cloud murmured, “Hey, Aerith. Just stopping by to pick up some water. Tifa says hi.” He paused before adding, “Maybe you already know, but Marlene’s started a garden on the bar’s roof. It’s winter, so she’s growing pansies, cy~la~men or something like that, and cabbage and carrots. She wanted to grow camellias and winter squash too, but we don’t have the room. Barret’s going to head out to Cosmo Canyon next week, wants to talk about windmills. We’re thinking about taking the kids and visiting Nanaki while he’s there. So… yeah, that’s how we’re doing right now.”

His mouth felt hollow. There were always so many more things he wanted to say, but finding the right words had never been easy for him. With a sigh, he gave a small nod. She would understand.

His soft footsteps on the wooden floor made a steady beat. The sweet, familiar scent from the yellow and white lilies that grew around the spring’s edges filled his head and lungs, settling around him like a cloak, seeping into his skin and bones. Denzel was crouched in front of the water, one arm wrapped around his knees, the other pushing a fallen petal around on the water’s surface. The small wake it left behind sent ripples dancing over the spring. 

He knelt beside him, mindful of the flowers. Noticing Denzel’s arms had goosebumps, he asked, “Still cold?”

“A little. The water’s cold.”

He eyed Denzel’s short sleeved hoodie. “I told you to bring a heavier jacket.” He’d even put on his own leather jacket, hoping the kid would follow his example. He hadn’t. Cloud rolled his eyes and unzipped the jacket, holding it out. “Here.”

Denzel’s eyes widened. “But what about you?”

Cloud shrugged. Midgar’s winters had nothing on Nibelheim’s or the North Continent’s. “Roll up the sleeves so they don’t get wet.”

He helped roll the sleeves up over Denzel’s wrists - Cloud wasn’t a big person, but Denzel was small for a nine-year-old. He was almost swimming in the jacket. Cloud shook his head with a silent chuckle as he reached into his satchel and pulled out two vials.

“Ready to help?” he asked, passing over one of the empty bottles.

“Yeah.” Denzel pulled out the stopper and dipped the glass into the water. It bubbled as water rushed in and air was forced out.

Cloud filled his own, capped it and set it to the side, then pulled out another two. Together they filled around thirty of the finger-sized vials with the healing water before putting them back into the bag.

As Cloud slipped the satchel back over his head, Denzel asked, “Do you still find people with the stigma?”

“Sometimes.” It was rare these days, and he was mainly giving out the spring water as a replacement for potions, rather than as an antidote to geostigma. Cheap, mass-produced potions had been easy to find a few years ago, churned out by Shinra, but the WRO’s replacement, though more effective, was also harder to come by. They had fewer factories, and scammers and hoarders soaked up a good deal of the released products, despite Reeve’s efforts combating them. Cloud didn’t charge for the water he handed out. It was free to whoever needed it, and as effective as a mega-potion.

“I’m going to put these in Fenrir, then look around. I’ll be back in an hour or so.” He said that, but didn’t leave the church immediately. A bad habit, Tifa said, of just wandering around an area, exploring, before going and doing what he needed to. It was a hard habit to kick when half the time he was rewarded with some overlooked treasure - a potion or two, equipment, a materia.

Denzel wandered around the church with him, finding a white dove feather and a lost doll. They placed it on one of the benches, in case its owner came back for it. Cloud found a phoenix down snagged in the broken colored glass of a window, and a blue whistlewind scarf forgotten in the corner. 

“Denzel.” He waved the boy over to join him near the Buster Sword, set as a monument beside the pool.

“What?”

Without saying anything, he wrapped the scarf around Denzel’s neck, just like his mother used to do with him. And like he used to, Denzel pulled away, tugging on the scarf. Stepping back, Denzel slipped on the uneven stones, slick with morning dew. Cloud reached out to catch him, got one hand wrapped around a thin arm. His arm was nearly pulled out of his socket at the unexpected weight.

Denzel was heavier than any formerly malnourished nine-year-old should be. Energy crackled in the air around them. Goosebumps that weren’t from the cold crawled over Cloud. He threw his free hand back, catching hold of the Buster Sword’s hilt, trying to arrest their fall. The blade came loose from the stone and they were both pulled into the water. 

Looking over his shoulder, through a haze of blurry blue, the world seemed to stutter, pause, and fall away. Split. Above him, he could see an image of himself pulling Denzel to his chest, back from the water’s edge.

The image faded, telescoping away as dark clouds and lightning formed a tunnel. A tunnel he and Denzel were free-falling through, down, back, to some destination he didn’t know. Frantic, he slipped the Buster Sword into his harness and pulled Denzel to him, holding the boy firm so they wouldn’t get split up. Denzel’s hands clutched at the wool of Cloud’s zipped turtleneck.

In the lightning, images flashed by. His fight with Sephiroth atop the ruined Shinra tower; fighting the Remnants; the first time he saw geostigma’s gray infection crawling across his skin. There were other images, too: running at Bahamut bare handed; sitting in the back of a truck with a bunch of kids; Tifa’s kind eyes as she pressed a damp cloth to his forehead. Not Cloud’s memories. Denzel’s.

Bringing Denzel to Seventh Heaven. Gaskin’s death, Cloud running his first delivery, designing Fenrir. Holding up a wood-framed wall as they built the bar, pulling a dented but still-sealed tin of soup out of the city ruins, helping an old man up the ramp to his new apartment in Edge. Ruvie’s death, Meteor and Holy, the northern crater. All of it, triumphs and failures, happinesses and sorrows. But it was all wrong, like he was watching through a screen or someone else’s eyes, instead of through his own. The memories started and extended past what he knew.

Ill at the Mideel clinic with Tifa beside him, Aerith’s body sinking under the blue water, Cait Sith alone in the temple just after they left, Aerith trapped in the science department with Hojo leering at her through the glass. White-knuckled watching a tv report of the Sector 07 pillar collapsing, the Sector 07 pillar collapsing under his feet. Tifa leaning over him at the train station, Zack on the cliff in the wastes reaching a torn and blood-stained glove to the sky… He looked, from this uncanny angle, like he was reaching out to Cloud. On pure instinct, Cloud reached back… and his hand caught Zack’s.

Zack was yanked out from the image, falling with them down the stormy tunnel. Frozen and unable to process, Cloud stared at him. He’d been awake in the image, smiling with what had looked like relief, but here - It was Zack, passed out, eyes bruised, mouth slack, blood from his wounds streaming behind them like macabre ribbons.

“Cloud!?” Denzel’s voice was a shout of alarm as he looked back and forth between Cloud and the man he’d pulled from thin air.

More memories, more visions, flashing by. Cloud didn’t look. They needed out now. He pulled Zack close, shifting so he could hold both of them in one arm. Denzel grunted as he was squished. With his free hand, Cloud unslung First Tsurugi, his base blade. He focused, channeling his energy down the long blade as it opened into its wider battle form. Energy like blue fire licked along the blade and he swung it, slicing through the dark clouds and lightning, forcing them to part. Light flared from the gash as they fell through it. The heavy pull of magic vanished, leaving behind the more familiar but no less dangerous pull of gravity.

Cloud twisted his body so he wasn’t falling head first and frantically pulled swords from his back, flinging them away as a silver rain on the rapidly approaching scrubland. He wasn’t going to land nicely, the last thing he needed was for somebody’s foot to get cut off as they hit the ground. He curled his arms around Zack and Denzel, protecting their heads, and braced for the impact. Cloud’s attempted roll did little to cushion them as they landed in a patch of scratchy shrubs. Denzel’s pained gasp and a bubbly, bloody oof of air escaping from Zack drowned out Cloud’s own quiet grunt. 

Pain went through his body like a red lance and he lay sucking in air. His legs had taken the worst of the impact, so his ankles and calves felt like they’d had nails driven through them. His right shoulder, which he’d improperly thrown himself onto to avoid crushing the others, felt as though a bomb had gone off inside the joint.

Denzel’s face, scratched and worried, appeared in his vision. “Cloud?”

He took a deep breath and tried to focus, reaching out and tapping into his Master Magic materia. Full Cure washed over the three of them as a soothing breeze, and the pain faded to a manageable soreness. With a grunt, he sat up. “You alright?”

Denzel nodded. The thin red scrapes on his face had vanished. “I am. But…” He looked at the bloody man sprawled in the bracken. “Who’s that?”

Cloud didn’t answer immediately, checking Zack’s pulse instead. There were inch-wide holes peppered in his uniform pants and turtleneck, the fabric stiff with blood, and weeping wounds dotted up and down his bare arms. Full Cure had done some good, stopping further bleeding, but his friend was still close to death. Stubbornly not thinking about the how or why this was happening, Cloud cast the spell twice more until Zack was no longer ashen gray from blood loss. Bullets forced out by regrown flesh littered the ground around them. Cloud had dealt with his fair share of gruesome after-battle healings, but his gut still clenched, looking at the lethal little missiles. There were so many.

He sat back. With the adrenaline fading, his hands were starting to shake, and a realization he’d never wanted was creeping up on him like a migraine. Zack had still been alive when Cloud had taken the sword and wandered away. He had left him there, all alone on the cliffs. He wanted to retch. 

Denzel’s hand on his shoulder made him look up. “Is he going to be okay?”

He took a steadying breath. “Yeah. Think so. Denzel, meet Zack.”

  
  
  



	2. A sight for sore eyes

The small campfire popped and sent sparks into the night sky with a snap. Denzel lay curled beside him, his sneakers sticking out from under the jacket draped over him as a blanket. On Cloud’s right side lay Zack, still unconscious, but clean. Regret, shock, and confusion might have had their hands around Cloud’s throat, but pragmatism pushed him forward. Zack had smelled of blood, and Cloud didn’t want any nearby monsters drawn to the odor. He didn’t know where they were exactly, an area of low, sandy dunes covered in scrub, but the plants and birds he saw suggested they were on the west continent. The birds had been helpful, at least - seabirds, mainly, gulls carried high on a moist, salt-smelling breeze.

Cloud had gathered his fallen swords and the vials of Aerith’s water that had fallen from his satchel (the majority having survived the fall), then they’d followed the breeze north to a deserted driftwood beach. A thread-like stream flowed down into a muddy delta, and Denzel helped Cloud wash Zack and his clothes clean of blood. The chore brought back hazy, indistinct memories of Zack doing similar for him, the year they’d been on the run.

Denzel had been wide-eyed, half-frightened, half-excited, all curious. Cloud didn’t have answers for most of his questions. At a guess, he’d say they were somewhere along the west continent’s northern coast between Costa Del Sol and Rocket Town. In the year 1999, according to his PHS. It must have synced up with the nearest tower. 

He pulled the device from his pocket again and flicked it open, the blue light blinding for a moment to his firelight-adjusted eyes. He scrolled through the numbers. Earlier, in a vain hope, he’d called Tifa and Seventh Heaven. Neither call had gone through. 

The few numbers in there that might work would likely lead to people who didn’t know him. No allies. He was half tempted to call Cait Sith. His mere possession of the A.I.’s direct number would prove he knew more than some prank caller or salesman trying to pitch to Urban Development. But Reeve was a Shinra executive at this point. He wasn’t safe to talk to, and Cloud didn’t know if Cait Sith had even been built yet.

Even with the Fusion Swords, Buster Sword, and several Master Materia, he felt vulnerable, sitting in a small shelter made of driftwood and heaped sand, miles from civilization and years away from his friends. He sighed and repocketed his PHS. He didn’t have anyone to call, but he shouldn’t let the battery run down. One step at a time. Tomorrow they would need to find some sort of settlement. He was capable of finding food in the wild, but they were lacking supplies. They had fresh water from the stream, but nothing to carry it in. Zack needed new clothes, Denzel a jacket of his own, and Cloud wanted a newspaper or something that would tell him the latest going-ons in the world.

At least they weren’t being chased by Shinra. But at the thought, his nerves started doing SOLDIER level acrobatics again. 

Sephiroth was still alive. 

It had plagued him all day. He raised his hands to his hair, balled them into fists, pulling. He clenched his teeth over the keening noise in his throat, trying to swallow it down. Gaia, why? He wanted to be done with that nightmare.

 _“I’ll never be a memory,”_ echoed in his head.

“Just shut up,” he ground out, voice barely a whisper in the small hut, drowned out by waves breaking on the shore outside. “I beat you. I beat you and I’ll do it again, this time before you have the chance to hurt anyone.”

And that was true, wasn’t it? He could see this as a second chance, a redo to stop his mistakes from happening. His hands dropped from his hair and his breath evened. He placed a hand on Denzel’s shoulder, feeling the skinny shoulder rising and falling. He had to be smart ,though. He couldn’t afford to be reckless.

* * *

Zack woke up.

That was good, if surprising. Honestly, the amount of bullets in him, he hadn’t thought he would. A faint, sleepy sense of horror drifted across his mind - Sephiroth and Genesis and Angeal, SOLDIERs and monsters - what the hell was he, if an entire army couldn’t take him out? Not that he was complaining, he was happy to be alive but… Shit! Cloud! He sat up with a jerk and stopped. He stared at the rickety construction a foot in front of him. Driftwood. And through the gaps, a glimpse of shining white, moving nearer and farther. Waves. Sea foam. Why was he in a hut made of driftwood?

“Zack -”

The voice that spoke was soft, hesitant and it nearly made him jump out of his skin. He spun and came face to familiar face with a pair of glowing blue eyes. Cloud’s eyes. He thought Cloud had left, that he’d successfully sent him away. “You came back for me?”

Those same eyes widened, then scrunched up in distress, taking on a distinctive wet shine. “Yeah. Kind of. I’m sorry. Zack, I’m sorry I left you, I’m sorry…” Whatever else he was saying was lost in a hiccup as he wiped at his eyes.

Zack pulled him into an embrace. “Don’t be sorry! You couldn’t even stand last time I saw you.” Cloud shuddered, body stiff. Zack ran a hand into his hair, comforting, but still pushed him away a little so he could look at him. His narrow face was fuller, his pale skin lacked the sickly green undertone Zack had gotten used to. Zack grinned and shook him gently. “You’re doing amazing, I knew you would recover! And look -'' he gestured to the driftwood shelter. “You even got us somewhere safe. I thought I was looking after you, not the other way round.” 

There was a sudden other voice in the hut. “Muuphf.” Someone waking up. Not Cloud. The noise made him jerk, looking for the potential threat. Cloud pulled away, half-turning and patting something - a person - behind him.

“Shhh. It’s okay. Go back to sleep.” Cloud kept his voice soft. Zack tried to peer around him, but the angle and poor lighting made it difficult to see.

A child’s voice mumbled, “M’ cold.”

Cloud reached past the other person and picked up some small bits of wood stashed over in the corner of the triangular shelter, and tossed them onto a small campfire just outside the hut. It spat and crackled, the wood smelling of salt as it caught fire. Had Cloud dragged them all the way around Midgar to the coast? Were they near Kalm?

“Can I…?” said the sleepy voice.

“Sure.”

Zack blinked as a kid climbed into Cloud’s lap and curled up against his chest. He was even more off kilter to see Cloud wrap a leather jacket around the kid, tucking it in like a blanket. For a while, neither of them said anything. Cloud watched the kid, and Zack watched the two of them. Eventually, the kid’s breathing became steady in sleep, and Zack whispered, “Who?”

Cloud had lots of bad days where he couldn’t talk, well or sometimes at all, so Zack had learned to read his eyes and expressions like a book. Right now, though, they flickered and filled with so many emotions, he wasn’t sure where to begin. He whispered back, “It’s a long story. I’ll bring you up to speed in the morning.”

“A long story that explains why we’re on the other side of Midgar near the sea?”

“Midgar? We’re on the West Continent, Zack.”

The West Continent? That was back where they started from! Zack froze for a moment, then dropped his head into his hands. How long had he been out for Cloud to get them all the way back here? “Cloud,” he whined, “I know it’s hard to believe, but I was trying to get us to Midgar.”

“I know. It wasn’t my choice we ended up here.”

Zack’s blood ran cold. His head snapped up. “Shinra?”

But Cloud shook his head. “They don’t know we exist.”

Strange choice of words, but if Shinra thought them dead… “You sure?”

Cloud looked down at the boy in his arms. “Positive.”

They sat in silence for another little while. A million questions ran through Zack’s mind. “So…” he ventured.

“Shhh. Get some rest. It’s a few hours to dawn. It’ll all be okay then.” Cloud closed his eyes, letting his chin rest on his chest.

There was something desperately determined in the way he said that. “Not sure who you’re trying to convince there, Cloudy.”

He only got a low hum in response. Zack sighed and ran a hand through his hair. His nerves were still on high alert - too many surprises. Still being alive, first of all, after making his peace with death. Cloud. The kid. Their location. The small shelter didn’t have enough room for him to stand or do any kind of exercise, plus he didn’t want to wake up the kid, so he settled for analyzing everything he could to try and figure out what was going on.

He’d been so surprised by seeing Cloud functional and the presence of the kid, he hadn’t taken in the details. Zack’s uniform was the same one he’d been wearing since Nibelheim, the pants threadbare in the knees and seat, the turtleneck fuzzy and stretched, and now all holed by bullets and smelling brackish, but Cloud’s clothes… They looked _like_ a SOLDIER uniform, but weren’t, and were a lot newer looking than the worn-down uniform Zack had last seen him in, the ragged partner to Zack’s own. The kid had clean jeans and sneakers with barely-worn tread. Cloud’s bare arms weren’t stringy and ropy anymore, and both of the dozing faces across from him had full cheeks, like they’d been eating well.

Plus there was Cloud’s hair. It had been four years since either of them had had a decent haircut. Zack had inexpertly cut Cloud’s a couple times, turning the spiky mess into something even spikier and messier. He hadn’t bothered with his own, and it was a shaggy mane. He pulled a lock over his shoulder and squinted at the split end. His hair was still the same, but Cloud’s was cut short, up off his neck. Not neat, because that wasn’t possible with Cloud’s hair, but trimmed and taken care of.

How long had he been out? He stared remorsefully into the fire. He’d lost four years at the lab. How much time had he lost now? Was that why Cloud had apologized? Had Shinra put him on ice or something?

The flames danced and licked along the charred pieces of wood, their light reflected in the Buster Sword and another large blade he didn’t recognize. Zack starred at the two swords side by side. Where had Cloud picked that up? There was something strange and segmented about it, and it was obvious by its size that only someone enhanced could wield it effectively.

He tallied the evidence. An unknown amount of time had passed, they were on the West Continent instead of the East, Cloud was recovered from his mako poisoning and the stresses of fugitive travel, and had picked up a new sword and a kid. That was a lot of jigsaw pieces, but no corners. He didn’t see anything else in the makeshift shelter.

What now?

He scooted closer to Cloud, putting an arm around him. Cloud’s shoulders went up and down evenly, his chest in and out. Feeling him breathe made Zack calmer. The kid had been right about the cold. Early mornings on the beach were always chilly. 

In his head, he tried to count how many nights he’d sat holding his semi-catatonic friend close, trying to keep them both warm. It had been his norm for months, right up to what seemed to him yesterday. Now Cloud was looking after a kid, doing the same. He turned his head, hiding his face in blond hair. “Please tell me everything will make sense in the morning,” he whispered. 

At this rate, would Aerith even remember him?

* * *

A feeling of pressure and claustrophobia woke Cloud. Denzel was curled against his chest, the leather jacket askew. The seam where the sleeve met body had risen and made a little tent only two inches from Cloud’s face. Zack was leaning against his side, a heavy arm draped around Cloud’s shoulders. Their presence should be comforting, but was stifling instead. He needed space, air. He tried unsuccessfully to wiggle his way free without waking them. Denzel only gave a mild sleepy protest, but Zack jerked awake, reaching across for a weapon.

But Cloud was in between him and the Buster Sword and he latched onto Zack’s outstretched arm. “Zack! It’s okay, it’s just morning.”

Zack blinked bright startled eyes at him, then remembrance dawned. “Huh? Oh, right…” He grinned ruefully. “Not used to you being up before me.”

“Get off,” came a muffled growl from under Zack, whose instinctive lunge had draped him over Cloud and Denzel.

Zack retreated back to his spot, running a hand through his hair. “Oops. Sorry, kiddo.”

Denzel sat up, face pinched, rubbing sleep and beach sand from his eyes.

Cloud’s lips twitched. He ruffled the boy’s hair and knocked sand out of it. “Denzel’s not a morning person,” he explained. 

“Neither are you,” Zack chirped in the way only a morning person can.

Cloud shrugged. “It’s fine.” An insomniac and a light sleeper, he wasn’t an any time-of-day person.

Zack gave him an odd look. “Cloud, rip the bandage off. How long have I been out?”

Cloud sucked in a breath. The ringing in his ears drowned out the sound of waves. His mouth dry, he forced the words out. “Only for a few hours.”

“No way.” Zack shook his head. “Forget the fact we’re on the west continent, just look at you. I’ve been out for a couple months, if not years.”

He winced. “Zack…” _You died._ The words remained stuck in his throat. He went for the less painful truth. “We’re in the past. It’s 1999.”

Zack blinked at him, uncomprehending. “What?”

He sighed, running a gloved hand through his own hair. “Denzel and I are from the year 010, somehow we fell into the past. I don’t know how it was possible but I managed to grab you from 07.”

“We’re in the past? Do you have any idea how crazy that sounds?!”

He _hated_ that word. His face shut down, losing all emotion.

“Cloud’s not crazy!” Denzel leapt to his feet. “We were at the church and I slipped and fell into the water. Cloud grabbed me but we were pulled through this weird wormhole and our memories kept flashing before our eyes. Then Cloud pulled you out of one of them and cut through the wormhole and then we were falling through the sky. Cloud saved your life! Don’t you dare call him crazy! It happened!” His narrow shoulders heaved as he glared for all he was worth at Zack. 

Zack raised his hand to placate him. “Sorry, I didn’t mean… It’s just a lot to take in, you know?”

Cloud’s voice became unstuck. “Yeah, we know. We went through that yesterday.”

There was an awkward silence before Zack extended his hand to Denzel. “I think we got off on the wrong foot. I’m Zack Fair, former SOLDIER 1st Class.”

Denzel’s glare faded, though he didn’t look entirely friendly. “Denzel. I’m Cloud’s…” He trailed off, biting his lower lip and Cloud reached out to him, setting a hand on his shoulder.

“I took him in almost two years ago.”

“Two years? Okay, I’ve obviously missed a ton. You’re gonna to have to start at the beginning. What happened to you after I gave you the Buster Sword?”

Cloud grimaced. He’d known he’d have to talk about it, but he’d hoped to put it off longer. What had Zack said earlier? Rip off the bandage?

“Well…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Zack’s hair, I’m going with OG where he had this long black mane.


	3. Alive and Kicking

(Day or so later, early February 1999, at a small coastal fishing village not to far from rocket town)

“Mercenaries.”

Cloud had a glass of water raised halfway to his lips. “What?” 

Zack grinned. Maybe it was the fact that he’d slept in a real bed last night or eaten good food cooked by someone else or the new clean clothes that didn’t smell like, blood, sweat, and dirt, or maybe it was just the overwhelming sense of freedom, of not having to constantly look over his shoulder for Shinra’s army, but he was in the best mood he could remember being in for a long time. “Let’s be mercenaries. Your gil’s not going to last forever, and between the two of us we can take on pretty much any job.”

Cloud set his drink down, eyes flicking around the small bar/restaurant they were eating at. There were only a handful of other patrons in the place, three men and a woman who looked and smelled like they worked on one of the small town’s many fishing boats, two teenage girls complaining over bowls of chowder about having nothing to do and dreaming of going to Costa del Sol, and a pair of men trading tales of crown lance jellyfish attacks at the bar.

“What about Shinra?” he asked in a quiet voice.

Zack’s mouth quirked. “What about them? They’re not looking for us. We’re free, Cloud.”

A little wrinkle appeared between Cloud’s eyebrows. “What about the future?”

He sighed. Trust Cloud to keep them goal focused. “I’m not saying to forget about it. I just need a couple months off. I mean I’ve been caught up with Shinra since I was thirteen! It’s time for a break.” That was true enough. He’d left home at thirteen, made SOLDIER when he was fourteen, 1st Class at sixteen, lab rat at eighteen and been dead by twenty-three. He’d only been alive for a little over two decades and half of that he’d spent as, to a greater or lesser degree, Shinra property. He wanted to do something else for a while.

Cloud stared at a black-headed gull on the fence outside the window. “I guess… It’s about four years until Nibelheim…” A screaming match broke out as another gull tried to steal the first one’s spot on a wooden post. The interloper won and Cloud’s eyes tracked the first one as it sailed out of sight, then he closed them with a faint grimace. There were fine wrinkles on his face that Zack didn’t remember, proof of a life he’d lived without him. His eyes opened and he looked at Zack with fierce determination. “I want to take JENOVA out before that.”

It was the same determination he’d seen there a hundred times over, on hard mornings and bad nights, when the pain and disorientation and helplessness might’ve made someone else give up. No matter what it cost him, Cloud would see this through. So, Zack nodded. “Of course. I don’t plan on taking a four year vacation. I need to save Angeal before April 01 after all. Probably should start working on that before October next year.”

Determination faded, replaced with curiosity. “What happens next October?”

“Nope.” Zack grinned and shook his head. “It’s February 1999. I’m not doing anything Shinra related for… oh, six months. No thinking, no worrying.” 

Denzel was listening, his cheek propped on his left hand, a confused pout growing on his face. Zack reached over and ruffled his hair. Denzel batted his hand away and the pout turned into a scowl. 

He laughed. “Come on, guys! Let’s just celebrate being alive for a while!” He waved a crispy, over-cooked fry through the air with an expansive gesture.

“Fish and fries is your way of celebrating?” Denzel wrinkled his nose, glancing at the breaded and fried fish Zack and Cloud were eating. Apparently the kid wasn’t a big fish person. He’d ordered a breaded sausage instead.

“Hey, this is food I didn’t have to catch, clean, or cook, and I don’t have to do the clean up. That’s good enough for me.” Amazing how priorities change, cause, yeah, once upon a time he’d have thought this a pretty sad excuse for a party. He shook his head clear. Nope. He was not thinking about the past right now, or the future. Only the present.

“So, mercenaries. Whaddaya say?”

“Good enough for now, I guess. We’ll need transportation.” He paused to think. “I know where we can pick up some wonderful yellow chocobos on the North Continent just across the sea from here, or if we do some materia trading and selling, we can get enough gil for motorcycles.”

“Hmmm. Mastered materia sells better, so I guess we start with chocobos until we can afford bikes.” Too bad. He liked motorcycles more than the big yellow birds. They didn’t leave _gifts_ for him to step in.

Cloud’s mood seemed to turn south, and he trailed a fry slowly through the dipping sauce. “Even when we can afford them, chocobos are better sometimes.”

He cocked his head. “What’s wrong?”

A shrug as Cloud took a bite of the fry. “Nothing. Just miss the golds and Fenrir.”

Denzel’s face lit up. “Can you rebuild Fenrir? Can I help?”

Cloud’s frown lifted at the corners. “Probably. I’d need a good frame to start with.”

Zack was still getting used to the dynamic between them. Neither of them had put it in so many words, but Cloud was basically Denzel’s dad, and definitely his hero. Zack kinda felt bummed about missing out on seeing Cloud grow from the scrappy little trooper he knew into the apparent badass he was now. “Fenrir’s a motorcycle, I take it? Wait, you made your own bike?” 

He hadn’t known Cloud was into that kind of mechanical stuff. There was loads he didn’t know about his friend, he realized. The few times before Nibelheim when their schedules had lined up to go out on the town, other people had tagged along and Cloud had been shy and quiet. Sure, there were all the talks they’d had back in the lab, when Cloud had been weakening and Zack was trying to keep him talking. This had mostly consisted of ‘stupid shit I did in the mountains and lived through’. Kid had basically given Zack a survival guide to the Nibel range, which had come in pretty handy after he broke them out. There was also the quick and dirty rundown Cloud had given him about the future yesterday. But that was it. All the little details of his life, his likes and skills, Zack had no clue. All the latter part of their captivity and their fugitive journey, Zack had done the talking for them both.

“Sort of.” Cloud picked up another fry. “I fixed one up and made it combat capable.” 

Zack’s eyes widened and he could feel excitement building. Shinra had made good bikes, but never any specifically designed for a SOLDIER’s reflexes. If Cloud had customized one… “SOLDIER combat capable?” he asked.

Cloud nodded.

Stars glowed in Zack’s eyes. “We are so doing that.” He could just see them tearing across the land in souped-up bikes.

Cloud brought him back down to earth. “It’ll have to wait until we have more gil.”

“Right. And I think I know where we can find our first job.” Zack turned in his seat to look at the two men at the bar. “Wait here.”

He walked over to them. They looked up in surprise. “Hey guys, couldn’t help but overhear. It sounds like you’ve got some monster troubles.”

______________________________________

(About two months later in North Corel)

Cloud took the combined fusion sword off his back and leaned it gently on the inn’s wall, rolling his shoulders at the loss of its weight. His shirt was sweaty where the sword had rested. March in North Corel was pretty pleasant, but they’d been working hard. Zack did the same with the Buster Sword and threw himself onto one of the room’s beds. It creaked alarmingly.

“That was boring. We should have charged twice as much.”

“We didn’t do anything.” They’d spent three hours of their morning helping clear boxes out of an old storage unit whose owner feared an infestation of grimguards. But they hadn’t seen any signs of the little imps.

“I know!” Zack whined. “We should have a monotony fee.”

Cloud rolled his eyes and sat down on the bed across from Zack. In the past month he’d learned a lot more about the man who’d saved him than he _remembered_ knowing. There were times when Zack did or said things that gave him deja vu, a formless sense of familiarity without a source, but also there were things he’d misremembered. How Zack looked, for example. He wasn’t quite as tall or broad as he was in Cloud’s memories, a little more scarred, his hair a lot longer. And sometimes his behavior was just surprising. 

In particular, Cloud remembered him as really patient and understanding, and now was finding he was wrong. Zack liked to be doing, at all times. He got bored with delays and frustrated with roadblocks. He grew snappy and a little sneery when he was tired or unhappy. In short, he was a regular person, not an idealized recollection.

“Barret used to complain about people who’d come to the bar, order one drink, then stay for hours. Said we should charge them for the space they took up.”

Zack laughed. “That’s good. That was at Seventh Heaven?” 

Cloud nodded.

“Y’know, I met a guy once who’d said he was going to open a bar, wanted a secret basement and everything. He was trying to come up with a name, so I said Seventh Heaven.” He rolled onto his stomach and grinned at Cloud. “Sounds like he liked it.”

That surprised him. “You named the bar?” 

“Guess so.”

Cloud shook his head. If Barret had known the place had been named by a SOLDIER, he definitely would’ve changed it. “Why that?”

“Why Seventh Heaven? Huh… let me think.” His mouth pursed and he stared hard at the wall, though Cloud could tell he wasn’t seeing the dry wood boards. “I’d just met Aerith. She seemed like an angel. Wings…” Zack trailed off before shaking himself and sitting up. “Angels were on my mind, I guess. And for a bar you want good vibes. Someplace you’d like to hang out. So, Seventh Heaven.”

Cloud wondered what Zack wasn’t saying, about the wings, but he knew the feeling of wanting to avoid sore subjects, so he didn’t ask. “It was.”

“Huh?” Zack cocked his head to the side.

“A place to hang out in. It had lots of regulars. The others would stop in from time to time and… it was home for Denzel and me.”

“Do you miss it?”

Cloud leaned back, his arms propping him up. Of course he missed it. He’d spent a long time running, avoiding the place, because he didn’t feel like he deserved to belong there. Forgiveness had found him anyway. “It was home,” he repeated quietly. A bunch of broken pieces that somehow fit together.

Zack regarded him. “Sorry you got dragged away.”

“It’s…” He shrugged. He missed them. Tifa, Marlene, Barret. He missed them all. But… “I’m glad I’m here. Got a second chance. Besides, it’s not like Denzel and I just disappeared on them.” That’d be a whole different picture.

“You really think time split?”

“It’s the only thing that explains that image I saw when we fell back.” Of seeing himself pull Denzel from the water.

“I guess…” Zack’s face twisted suddenly and he looked away.

“What’s wrong?”

“I miss Aerith.” He hit the mattress with a closed fist, not hard, but enough that the frame creaked again. “I promised I’d go see her. I’ve broken so many promises, I was really trying to keep that one. Now she doesn’t even know who I am.”

Cloud did the mental math. “She’s fourteen now.”

“Yeah, and my younger self will be fifteen. They don’t meet for another year. _If_ they meet.” Zack let out a huge sigh, then gave himself a good shake and hopped up from the bed, the mattress springing under him. 

“Well, at least we’ve got each other. Right?” Zack grinned at him.

It looked a little forced, so Cloud did his best to return it. “Sorry I’m not a mischievous, green-eyed brunette.”

It got the intended effect. Zack laughed, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “No, you’re definitely not Aerith. But~ you are a cute blond, I’m into those too” he said in a sing-song voice, rocking back on his heels.

Cloud kicked his friend’s knee. 

“Hey!” Zack fell back onto his bed, still laughing.

Glad to see him in a better mood, even at his own expense, Cloud shook his head. “Whatever. I’m going to go find Denzel. Told him he could help me train the chocobos today.” The birds from the Corel Desert were good birds, but he was going to need them at A rank before he could breed them to get a blue or a green.

He collected the fusion swords as he headed for the door, and Zack waved a lazy hand in farewell. “He’s probably playing with the same kids as yesterday, over by that rock pile.”

“Probably.” Cloud opened the door.

“You know, he’s a resilient kid. Kinda reminds me of you.”

He stopped and looked back into the room. Zack was sitting up, his chin resting on the back of his hand. His expression was fond, plus something else that Cloud couldn’t read. “Really?”

“Yeah. Sweet but tough.”

Ignoring that Zack had just called him sweet he focused on the description for Denzel “He’s been through a lot. That’s why I… I want to be there for him.”

Zack’s smile became even softer, “You’re a good dad.”

He frowned “I don’t know about that. I don’t think Denzel sees me that way.” Denzel had a dad before the plate fell, Cloud was just a substitute.

The other man’s expression went from found to a look “Cloud… Sure, the kid has stars in his eyes when he sees you, but it’s more than that. You’re definitely family.”

He shrugged and headed out, but he felt the flush of happiness creeping into his cheeks. _Family._


	4. Birds of a Feather

(In the past for three months. April, Nibel Mountain range.)

“This is as far as the chocobos can go.” Cloud dismounted his bird and led it over to the small foothill town’s inn and stable. The birds were B-ranked now, but they weren’t greens and couldn’t handle thin air or steep terrain.

Zack sighed as he dismounted behind him. “Man, I did not think I would ever come back to these mountains.”

Cloud shrugged. “They’re not that bad.”

“Not that bad, he says.” Zack threw an arm around Denzel’s shoulders. “Do you have any idea how many things tried to eat us last time?”

Cloud answered absently as he pushed open the stable door and looked around the dim interior for an open stall. “I grew up here, so yeah, I do.” 

There, two stalls across from each other. Cloud led his bird Gàta into one, gesturing for Denzel to bring Dæll over. “Zack, put Stígr in that stall across.” He wanted to keep the drake away from the hens.

Denzel paused in the entryway, looking up at the towering peaks. “We have to _walk_ up there?” His tone bordered on a whine.

Cloud came to stand beside him, squinting at the gleaming snow-covered slopes. It was April, and the air in the foothills was still cold. “We’re heading for where the zuus are. They make their home in the taller peaks behind these ones.” The giant birds nested up in the glacial horns where there wasn’t enough prey to sustain wolves and the temperatures were too cold for dragons. But to get there, hunters had to go through wolf and dragon territory. And snow. Lots of snow.

That was why they’d stopped here. The birds needed to be stabled, and they had to get cold weather supplies from the town’s general store. He contemplated leaving Denzel behind. He could get a room for the boy when he registered the chocobos. 

Denzel, handing him Dæll’s reins, seemed to sense his thoughts. “Don’t leave me here.”

“These mountains aren’t kind, Denzel. Zack’s right about the monsters, but they aren’t my biggest concern.” He knew he could fight any living thing the mountains could throw at him. He’d fought them all at one point or another.

“Everything up there, weather, terrane, all of it can kill.” The altitude and thin air, the steep slopes littered with scree that fell away into sheer valleys hundreds of feet deep. Glacial lakes and rivers that could lead to hypothermia. Stone runs where a single misstep could mean a broken leg.

“But…” Denzel trailed behind him as Cloud led the yellow hen into the stall. “You grew up here. I want to see it.”

“We’re not going into Nibelheim,” he said, untacking the two birds, relieving them of the saddle and pack.

Across the aisle, Zack rested his saddle over his shoulder. “You sure you don’t want to stop by? I mean I know it’s not your home anymore, but just to check in and see how everyone is doing?”

Cloud dropped the first of his two saddles onto the stall rail. “And what?” he grumbled. “We’d just cause problems being there.” He didn’t need to feed the rumor mill in a town he never wanted to see again. Original buildings and residents or not.

Zack ran a hand through his hair, making the black spikes more erratic. “I dunno. See your mom, check to see if you have a younger self living there?”

Cloud paused, brows furrowed. “Why wouldn’t I?”

Zack shrugged. “This stuff’s weird. What if only one version of us can exist at a time or something?”

That was a disturbing thought, if his younger self had just vanished. His mother, suddenly alone. Bereft. He turned back to the hens, pulling off Gàta’s saddle. He handed Denzel a grooming brush and took one himself while he thought. Running on auto-pilot through the rhythmic motions.

Chocobo feathers weren’t like your average birds feathers, they couldn’t fly so they didn’t need to be stiff or streamlined. Beside the feathers that made up their characteristic crest and wing tips they were covered in soft fluffy plumes. It was these plumes that could be damaged by the saddle and girth. Running a soft brush over the feathers he worked until each layed smooth.

“I don’t think it’s likely,” he said at last. “It was only for a few seconds, but there were two of me and Denzel at the church. It feels like, if we somehow hadn’t fallen…” He stopped. He didn’t know how to put it in words. He just had a feeling in his gut that it was okay for there to be two of them.

He looked over at Zack. His face was screwed up skeptically, but he didn’t say anything. Probably didn’t feel like arguing over something that was all guesswork. 

Once Cloud was satisfied with how the birds looked, he picked up their packs, which were small and light, containing nothing but the necessities they’d picked up over the last few months, and headed for the inn next door. The inn and the door were made of rough timber beams, and the window inset in the door was made of four diamond-shaped panels of thick, wobbly glass. It gave him an unwelcome pang of nostalgia. Inside was a dimly lit but thankfully warm lounge and reception area. A few tables set to the side served as a restaurant for guests.

Behind the counter, a wiry man with thinning hair set the book he’d been reading to the side and stood. “Welcome to Nibelvale Inn. Looking for a room?”

Cloud didn’t answer. Heavy, booted feet were stomping down the stairs. He turned to Zack, but it was too late. Several Shinra troopers in blue fatigues came into the room, jostling and ribbing each other good-naturedly. They stopped when they noticed him and Zack and saluted, looking surprised. “Sirs!”

Cloud froze, and Zack, equally tense, threw him a wide-eyed look. What? Why did they… Of course. The black clothes he and Zack wore weren’t SOLDIER uniforms, but they were both used to high collars, no sleeves, and roomy trousers, and they’d picked clothes with those features, though Cloud had his jacket over his. They both carried oversized swords and had mako eyes. There wasn’t anything they could be at this point in time _but_ SOLDIERs. Before he could think of a solution, Zack stepped forward and waved carelessly.

“At ease, guys. We aren’t part of your mission, so don’t worry about formalities. Carry on.”

The troopers relaxed but didn’t leave, staring instead at what they thought were two 1st Classes. Cloud’s muscles were rigid, trembling with a fight or flight response. Denzel half-hid behind him. Zack ignored them all and turned to the inn keep. “Just boarding some chocobos for a couple days. I’ll give you a down payment and settle up when we get back.”

Cloud shifted his weight onto his left leg and crossed his arms, trying to look relaxed. He was glad that Denzel had the sense to keep his face turned away. 

“Hey?” Zack caught his attention and raised his eyebrows, sending a pointed look at Denzel.

Cloud shook his head. He wasn’t comfortable leaving him here. Not with Shinra in the area. Why were the troopers here anyway? Would they report seeing SOLDIERs? The last thing Cloud wanted was Shinra’s attention on them.

Zack finished at the counter and pulled the red-scarfed sergeant to the side. Cloud scanned the rest of the room and listened in on the conversation. The squad was escorting some scientists who were researching something in the area. Yeah, he was definitely not leaving Denzel here.

“Hey, do me a favor and don’t put that you saw us in your mission report.”

“Sir?”

“You know how it goes. Sensitive mission, Turks, all that.”

The sergeant nodded briskly. “Yessir. You can count on me.”

Zack slapped the guy on the shoulder before turning back to Cloud and Denzel. “Alright, let’s get this show on the road.”

Cloud headed for the door. The watching troopers, their three-eyed helmets hiding their faces but not their interest, made his skin crawl. Outside the door, he dug into his pack. He tossed an Enemy Away materia to Denzel. “Equip that.”

He watched him fumble it into a bronze bangle Cloud had modified to fit his thin wrist. At least Denzel wouldn’t have to worry about monsters.

* * *

Zack swung down into a large Zuu nest. Branches snapped underfoot. The nest was made of what seemed like whole trees, feathers as long as Zack’s arms, and strips and chunks of fur. Some of it looked awfully like a wolf pelt. The whole thing smelled terrible, a ghastly mix of guano and abattoir. “Who loses their engagement ring to a Zuu?” he complained. “I mean, a dragon I can understand. They’re attracted to shiny things.”

Rock and snow tumbled down as Cloud landed beside him, throwing up a hasty barrier, just in case. “Zuus’re attracted to things of personal importance.” He grunted, bringing his fist to his chest and channeling another spell.

Tossing a tattered mountain goat hide away, Zack found this nest’s stash of assorted goodies: a soggy notebook, a desiccated goat’s hoof, wilted flowers, a scrap of fabric, a tarnished silver bell, but no ring. There was a loud _thud_ and he turned to see one of the giant dark birds sliding down Cloud’s barrier like a cartoon crow hitting a window. Beyond it, a host of Zuus filled the sky, fanged beaks and curved talons glinting. Looked like they’d roused the whole aerie.

Cloud released a powerful wind attack, sending the monsters tumbling into each other. Screeches and feathers filled the air as the birds snapped and clawed at each other, trying to regain their equilibrium in the air. Zack took the opening provided and jumped to the next nest, Cloud covering his back. 

“But how do they know what’s important?” he asked, rummaging in the new nest.

Cloud didn’t answer immediately, fending off an enraged, dive bombing pair. “Don’t know,” he grunted. “In the early days they were worshiped as protectors of precious things and as storm bringers.”

The ring wasn’t in this one either. He unslung the Buster Sword and, with the help of a long range materia, cut the primary wing feathers off one of the monsters. It screeched as it fluttered to the jumbled rock pile far below. “Stormbringers, huh? Do they cast lightning?” He eyed the horde. That would make life a lot more difficult.

“No.” Cloud leapt from the ledge and cast stop on the nearest zuu. He used its body as a springboard, leaping to meet the ones above. Zack followed him, batting incoming monsters to the side with the flat of the blade.

“Then how’d they get associated with storms?” Huh. Whichever zuu owned this nest seemed to combine sentimental with practical, if the littered goat and cow bells and blue ribbons was any indication. He snorted, trying to get the carrion smell out of his nostrils. They’d been hired to find the lost ring, but it wouldn’t have surprised him if the local ranchers had offered the job instead.

Cloud joined him on the narrow ledge. “Wind attacks. They were said to shepherd thunderstorms across the sky.”

“Do they?” Zack asked as another dived at them. He used the Buster to smack it aside before shimmying along the ledge to the next nest.

“Don’t know. They do take advantage of storms to stage their raids, though. Incoming!”

Cloud’s voice became more urgent. Zack looked up in time to be hit with a massive wind blast that destroyed both the nest and the brittle rock face they stood on. 

His footing gave way. _Shit._ Free Falling amongst rock and debris, Zack twisted his blade around as defense from the incoming birds. He whipped his head around, looking for Cloud. Instead of his partner, his eye landed on a small, metallic flash of gold. _Please be the right ring, and not a necklace or a coin or something._

Angling his body, Zack fell with a purpose. Wind whistled past him and he had to squint to keep his eyes on the prize. _Almost there._ He reached out and snagged the ring. “Gotcha!” 

Now all he had to do was survive the landing.

Zack brought his feet around to connect with a chunk of falling rock. With little time left before he hit the ground, he pushed off. The jump was weak at best, but it brought him to another falling rock. This time the push was stronger and he kept rebounding until he had full control over his momentum. One more push and he sent himself to solid ground, clear of falling debris.

Out of harm’s way, he scanned the glacial horn for his partner. There, ringed by a corona of gold and blue light, and seeming to hang in the air. Except, Zack squinted… There was more than one Cloud. More kept appearing - after-images. That was it. Cloud was moving too fast for him to track. He grinned, fascinated. Honestly, it was mesmerizing.

As the images faded, bits and pieces of the Zuus’ bodies rained down into the snow. Cloud’s swords came next, each blade hitting the soil improbably point down and embedding themselves. Jogging over as Cloud himself landed, Zack let out a whistle. “That’s an impressive limit break.”

Cloud glanced at him as he gathered up and rejoined the pieces of his sword. “Omni-slash. It’s my level four.”

“Huh.” Zack tilted his head. “It’s not Comet?”

“Comet? I’ve got Meteorain, but not…” He shook his head. “Comet’s a materia.”

“I know but… I picked you up as Comet. That’s how I knew you were going to be special.” He winked, throwing an arm around the shorter man’s shoulders. “You left a mark. And a strong one at that.”

Cloud looked up at him, puzzled. “A mark? You talking about your weird-ass limit break copying thing?”

Zack grinned while, high above, the last of the Zuus circled warily. “Yeah. I couldn’t believe I got something so cool from some tiny trooper. All I got from Tseng was like, a helicopter.”

Cloud’s frown grew. “What does it do? Crash?”

Zack laughed at the memory that brought back, of the chopper going down in the Modeoheim mountains and having to hike over them, his first time meeting Cloud, and Tseng’s exhausted terseness as the trek went on. “Nah, it works like a summon. Shows up, fires missiles, vanishes. It’s bizarre.”

“Hm.” Cloud looked up, eying the broken mountainside. “Guess we’re not finding that ring.”

Zack’s grin stretched even further. He held out his fist with a dramatic flourish, opening it to reveal the little gold band. “Got it,” he chirped.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My thoughts on Chocobo feathers. As ground birds, their feathers would be similar to the ratites. Basically a cross between Ostrich, Emu, and Cassowary feathers w/stiffer crest feathers and leading-edge wing feathers. Gold chocobos would also be iridescent like Cassowaries to create that shimmer and shine effect.


	5. Bitter Medicine

(Later that day, Nibel Mountains)

“Should we make camp?” Zack asked. They were miles away from the Zuus and the glacier. The sun was long set on the other side of the range. They had another hour or so of gathering dusk before night actually fell, but they weren’t gonna make it down the mountain tonight. Not with Denzel with them. Zack and Cloud, with their keen night vision, could keep going if they had to, but one of them would have to carry Denzel. It’d leave them at a disadvantage if some of the nocturnal Nibel wildlife attacked. Plus, it was _cold_. There was a chill breath of glacial wind that moaned between the twisted rock spires that stuck up everywhere and in every knife-sided crevice in the ground.

Denzel looked up hopefully at the suggestion, but Cloud didn’t answer directly.

“Zack?”

“Yeah?”

“Since we’re here, I…” He trailed off. His eyes were fixed on some distant point. Zack tracked his gaze and saw the silhouettes of mountains, backlit by a sick green haze. “You don’t have to come with me. I know you’re on break. But I’m going to take care of JENOVA.”

A chill that had nothing to do with elevation shuddered down Zack’s spine. Right. JENOVA. It made sense for Cloud to bring it up now. They were in the area, after all. If ever there was an opportune time…

“Uh. Okay. You got a plan on how to do it? And how do we not get caught?” The reactor had a maintenance team, after all. It was their disappearance, plus a rise in monster activity, that had led to the Nibelheim mission.

Cloud’s attention snapped to Zack. “I thought you wouldn’t want…”

“We’re partners, right? If you’re sticking your neck out, I’m sticking mine out too.”

Cloud was silent for a moment before nodding slowly. “Right. Thanks.”

“Um… Can we still make camp, or are we gonna be walking in the dark?” Denzel was hugging himself and stamping his feet, cold even in his wool coat and gloves, the whistlewind scarf pulled up over his nose.

Some of the tension left Cloud’s shoulders. He put a hand on Denzel’s head. “We’ll go tomorrow.”

One of the many, _many_ nice things about not being on the run from Shinra anymore was that they didn’t have to hide their campsites anymore. Cloud gathered firewood and foraged for edible plants while Zack set up their camp with help from Denzel. He made a shelter by bending over a sapling and staking it down, leaning branches he cut from nearby pines against it to make insulated walls. Denzel gathered moss, tree leaves, and pine needles for soft bedding to lay their bedrolls on.

Shelter finished, Zack made a fire, and Denzel got water from a nearby stream. Cloud used their only pan to blanch some common morels he’d found. When he was satisfied with them, he poured out the water, chopped the mushrooms up, and added them to a stir-fry of foraged greens. There were some leaves that looked like spinach, others that looked like a geranium’s, something that tasted of garlic, and the tender tops of ferns. The warm food went well with slices of the dry, spiced sausage they’d bought in town.

It was a lot nicer than Zack’s cautious attempts at cookery during their escape from these mountains. In a rare instance of thinking before he spoke, he didn’t say so. He knew that if Cloud could have helped back then, he would have.

He looked across the fire at Cloud, who’d hardly touched his food. He was staring into the fire, watching a pinecone sizzle and send up sparks. His face was pinched and his eyes dark. “What’s up?” Zack asked.

Cloud didn’t move, but he answered. “JENOVA. We both have her cells. It could be a problem.”

“Ah. Yeah.” Zack did his own staring into the fire for a minute. Cloud had given him some information on the alien in bits and pieces, as he could bring himself to talk about it. Zack had known some already - the scientists had talked plenty about J-cells, not bothering to keep their mouths shut in front of a pair of doomed lab rats. So had Genesis, though making sense of what Genesis said had been hard the first time they met and got harder with every subsequent meeting. “You thinking we could end up going the way Sephiroth did?”

A moody nod.

That… could be a real problem. 

Angeal had clung to sanity by his fingernails, forcing Zack into mercy-killing him before he lost it entirely. Sephiroth’s breakdown had been terrifyingly swift. Genesis had dragged hundreds of SOLDIERs and troopers down into monsterhood with him and never expressed a single regret over it. And Cloud, from what he’d told Zack, had suffered some serious identity fragmentation. Of the super-enhanced, super-powerful, souped-up-by-alien-DNA people Zack had met, not counting himself, the track record on going mad was four for four.

Denzel spoke up, breaking Zack out of those grim thoughts. “What about Vincent? Do you think he’d help?”

“Who?”

“He’s -” Denzel stopped, apparently thinking of how to describe the person, “one of our friends. He helped Cloud save the world.”

Zack looked at Cloud for confirmation. “He’s in the area?”

“I… He doesn’t know who we are right now.” Cloud’s face had shifted from pinched to thoughtful.

“We can always introduce ourselves. It’s always great to have friends, and if he’s already here…” Zack shrugged. Friends were a good thing, and if Cloud liked him, Zack knew he must be an awesome guy.

“He’s sealed inside a coffin in the manor basement.”

A small, half-forgotten memory surfaced. “Sleeping in a coffin in the basement?”

“Yeah.” 

“Huh. I might’ve met him.”

They looked startled. Zack explained. “So, before everything went to pot, I poked around the village and met this kid who told me about the Seven Wonders of Nibelheim. One of ‘em was about the secret caverns under the mansion and how to get down there.” He laughed. “Pretty piss-poor security, huh? Anyway, there was this room with coffins and I heard snoring from one. I thought about checking it but figured - eh, if this guy wants to sleep in a coffin, do I really want to bother them? So I didn’t.”

“Yeah. That’s Vincent. He was a Turk who got on the wrong side of Hojo.”

“Brrr.” Zack shuddered. “And I bet the company just let him have him.” They’d just let Hojo have _him_ , after all, and he’d basically been leading SOLDIER at that point. But even as he said it, he wondered. He _knew_ the Turks were a bunch of professional backstabbers who couldn’t be trusted an inch, but Cissnei letting him and Cloud go, twice, had given him a certain amount of stubborn faith in them. More than that, he knew they looked after their own. 

“Actually, no. Hojo reported he died in action.”

“Huh. Guess not even Hojo is willing to get on the Turks’ bad side.” Something to keep in mind for later.

* * *

The basement was just as miserable as Cloud remembered it. Icy-cold, pitch-black, and stinking of guano and mildew. Dampness oozed between the stones of the walls and turned the floor to mud. He’d been in caves that felt more alive and less foreboding. 

It was so dark, in fact, that the glow from his eyes, usually too faint to make any difference in the lighting, showed the teardrop shape of vampiric black bats clinging to the tunnel’s support beams. They began to stir and chitter, sensing warm prey nearby. The Master Magic materia slotted into his wrist bangle lit up and he lashed out with a torrent of electricity. The bats’ bodies dropped like stones before they’d had the chance to unfurl their wings.

Behind him, Zack whistled. “Guess that answers my question.”

“What question?”

“Whether the flying guard dogs had been put in yet or not.” The words were light, but the tone was strained.

“You okay?” Cloud asked. He looked back. His vision was adjusting. The tunnel seemed only night-dim now, but Zack’s eyes still cast their own faint light in the darkness. 

Zack rubbed the back of his neck and shrugged. “Eh, just this place. You know. But I’ll be fine. How ‘bout you?”

Cloud said nothing. He looked at Denzel standing between them, hands held out anxiously to find his way. Cloud took one of them. 

“Thanks,” Denzel said.

“Sure.” It’d been too dangerous to leave the boy on the manor’s top floors and too risky to leave him outside. Safest to have him with them. And it gave Cloud something to think about that wasn’t the skin-crawling horror of being back here. Was he okay? No, but he had to act like it. “Let’s go get Vincent.”

It wasn’t hard to find the right room. Every inch of this place was seared into Cloud’s memory. He wasted no time in prying off the coffin lid. Vincent lay still inside it, like a freshly embalmed corpse. On the long walk here, Cloud had carefully gone over what he would say. But now, actually being here, in this place, the planned out words left him. 

Time stretched awkwardly until Zack and Denzel piped up at once.

“What now?” asked Zack.

“Aren’t you going to talk to him?” Denzel burst out.

“I…” Get it together, Strife. “Vincent.”

A red eye cracked open. Despite years of disuse, Vincent’s deep baritone wasn’t even hoarse. “Leave this nightmare.”

“As soon as you come with us. We need your help to destroy JENOVA.”

The man’s other eye opened, blatantly assessing them before he closed them both again. “What anyone does with that being is none of my concern.”

Shit. What were the planned words? He’d _thought_ about this! Lucrecia, Sephiroth. Both would mean something to Vincent. Cloud didn’t know a whole lot about Lucrecia, but he knew too much about Sephiroth. “JENOVA can influence those who have her cells. She wants the world destroyed. If she’s not stopped, she’ll use Lucrecia’s son Sephiroth to do it.”

Not a flicker of emotion from Vincent. His voice was flat. “Theory. Not fact.”

Cloud bit down on a sharp flash of anger, keeping himself from snapping an answer. It _was_ a fact. If they didn’t stop him, Sephiroth would go on a murder spree across the planet, acting out the merciless instincts of his alien mother. He knew it, he’d lived it, he had the scars to prove it!

He took a shuddering breath. That wasn’t fair. Vincent didn’t _know_ they were from the future, that they had lived through that very scenario. And he wasn’t inclined to tell him just yet. Didn’t need to be labeled crazy.

Uncurling his fists, Cloud said, “We have her cells in us too.” He waved a hand, indicating himself and Zack. “Not as many as Sephiroth,” no, they had S-cells to make up for that, “but we’re still… vulnerable to her. I know it from experience. I’ve felt her in my head. Resisting JENOVA is…” His throat closed up. He forced the words out anyway. “Difficult at best, impossible at worst, and the more cells you have…” He looked down into Vincent’s red eyes. They were open again, observing, probably picking up on all kinds of things, body language, micro expressions, who knew what else. Turks were trained to read that kind of thing. And he was enhanced too, with something as strange and terrifying as JENOVA inside him, if not as alien. 

SOLDIERs saw well in the dark, but Vincent moved through the shadows like he was one of them. What did Vincent see, what kind of vision had Hojo’s nightmare experimentation given him? They’d never talked about it between themselves, never gone past how much they both hated the scientist. He looked at the man in the coffin, and tried to put all the trust he had in his future self, all the empathy he had for his past and current self, into his face and voice. “If things go wrong, we’ll need someone without J-cells as back-up. We’ll need you.” 

Vincent lay perfectly still. He closed his eyes.

Disappointment bit Cloud like a wolf.

Then Vincent sprung from the box in one fluid movement. “To atone from my sins. By aiding you, I aid Lucrecia’s son.”

Helping Sephiroth was the last thing on Cloud’s list. He’d rather wear a dress and play the princess in that stupid Gold Saucer performance. All the same, he felt a lot lighter suddenly. “Yes.”

From there, things progressed quickly. Vincent knew of a tunnel between the basement and reactor, one that would allow them to get past security at the reactor and into the structure’s inner core. Zack held Cloud back before they entered the elevator leading down to it, and asked if he was sure about not seeing his mom. “Maybe check in after JENOVA? On the way down?”

“I’m sure, Zack.” He didn’t want anyone in the village to know they’d been here. Besides, they didn’t know what was going to happen inside the reactor. If his time with AVALANCHE had taught him anything, it was have a plan, be ready for when it goes FUBAR, and get good at improvising.

The tunnel, when they reached it, was dank with murky water draining past. Vincent stepped into it with no apparent reservation about the dirty water that reached to his mid-calf.

Sighing, Zack followed him. “Man, wet socks are the worst.”

Cloud eyed the small boy next to him, squinting determinedly into the gloom. “I’m going to carry you, Denzel.”

“I can walk.”

“There’s something bad in the water.” The air was filled with a particular earthy sewage and fish smell that he’d come to associate with Sahagins, a creature that thrived in filthy water. Along with it came a faint sulfur smell that meant diluted mako, probably leaking from the reactor.

This statement made Denzel give the stream a cautious look. Not waiting for further complaints, Cloud unsheathed his combined fusion swords and scooped the boy up, settling Denzel on his left hip, holding his swords in his right hand. After a few muted grumbles, Denzel wrapped his arms around him, hiding his nose against Cloud’s shoulder, trying to avoid the stench as the three adults’s cautious steps disturbed the polluted water. Clouds of silty, greenish mud spread in their wake.

Though Cloud was ready for a fight, Zack and Vincent took out all encountered Sahagins. The monsters’ tridents and spears did little good against the reach and heft of the Buster Sword and the speed of Vincent’s gun.

Reaching the reactor was a small relief, and that was saying something, since Cloud despised reactors. The smell of the place crawled up his nose and made his head hurt in a way the tunnel hadn’t managed, but at least he could see where he was putting his feet. He set Denzel down on the metal floor and turned to the others. “Do you know if guards or scientists will be in the inner chambers?”

Vincent remained silent while Zack checked his PHS. “This time of night? Not likely. This place only has a skeleton staff, anyway. My guess, they’re all in bed. Don’t trigger any alarms, and we should be fine.”

“Alright. Denzel. Stay close, but if I tell you to hide…”

A stubborn press of lips and a nod signified the boy understood.

Rubbing his temple in an attempt to relieve his increasing headache, Cloud headed for the stairs, ignoring the service elevator. “Let’s get this over with.”

The stair was switchbacked and claustrophobic, and they went slow and cautious, alert for enemies and traps. Everything was gleaming metal and painted caution stripes, pipes and vents and glittering lights. On several flights, they had to make their way through a laser trip-wire system, and once, they crammed into a narrow alcove while a pair of security drones hummed past. Cloud breathed shallowly, feeling like the two giant walls were pressing closer together. Outside one, the harshness of Mt. Nibel; on the far side of the other, the borehole into the earth, filled with drills and pumps and sloshing mako. 

After nine minutes of stairs and ladders and catwalks, Cloud had to stop for breath, shaking his head. Why was it so hard to… Oh. Yeah. He took a deep breath, grounding himself. “Zack. How you doing?”

Zack leaned heavily, one-handed, on a railing. His arm trembled slightly. “Should not be feeling as tired as I do from climbing some dumb stairs. I’ve got this killer headache.”

“Head full of static and an occasional stabbing pain like someone’s trying to rip their way into your skull?”

“Yeah?” Zack flashed him a worried glance.

“JENOVA.”

Zack jerked upright. “But! I was fine last time I was here!”

“Had less J-cells in you.”

“Fuck.” He was quiet for a minute, glaring at a pulsing green light on the wall opposite them. “Are you sure this is a good idea? I mean, what are our chances of going all Sephiroth?”

“Just focus, Zack. Focus on what’s important to you, what’s at stake, and why you’re here.” He wasn’t saying it only for Zack’s sake. He was saying it for himself too. It wasn’t just their autonomy at stake, but the lives of everyone on the planet. All the villagers down there in Nibelheim, all his friends scattered across the planet, Denzel.

As if on cue, he felt a small hand wrap around his. “It’s going to be okay. I know it will.”

He offered Denzel a weak smile, giving a gentle squeeze. Encouraged, the kid reached out to Zack too, took his hand. He looked up at both of them with determination. “Both of you, you can do this.”

“Yeah. We got this.” There was a strained edge to Zack’s grin, but his jaw set with fresh resolve.

Whatever thoughts Vincent had on the exchange, he didn’t voice them. Not that Cloud had expected him to. They reached a door, finally, that Zack seemed to recognize. He opened it, poked his head in, then waved them in after him.

“Okay. If memory serves, it goes this room, ‘nother room, pod room, reactor core, and JENOVA.”

“Yeah,” Cloud said. His head still hurt, but the breather a few minutes ago seemed to have helped. He looked at Zack. “Good?”

“Still good. You?”

Shaky… but. “Still good.” He had to be. Couldn’t be a failure.

Entering the pod room, however, made his lungs seize. He staggered as pain pulled up images from that night. _Tifa, bleeding at the bottom of the stairs. Zack, crumpled in a mess of metal, thrown halfway through a pod._ He bit his tongue, felt the muscle tear, tasted copper. Focus, damn it. Don’t lose yourself.

He blinked. Zack was standing at the top of the short stairs, head tilted curiously. “Doin’ okay, buddy?”

Shaking his head to clear it, he forced himself to move forward. “Just memories.” His voice sounded thick.

Whatever JENOVA dug up didn’t matter. She could root around in his head all she liked. He knew what he was here to do. Nothing she could show him would change that. 

Ahead of him, Zack entered the core, sword drawn.

“Denzel, stay out here.”

Cloud stepped in after him. His free hand flew up and clutched at his head. His mind filled with cotton and lightning. 

_“My child”_

Zack was out on the catwalk, almost to her shrine.

Through gritted teeth, he growled, “I’m not yours.”

A wave of pain lanced though him. His mother’s dying face floated before him, covered in smoke and blood, twisted in fear and pain.

_“Shinra hurt her”_

He staggered forward. “It was your fault.”

Metal shrieked and wires sparked as Zack grasped the shield in front of the tank and heaved, tearing the ornate visage away in one massive effort. JENOVA was laid bare, an alien, sinister monster. Her hair floated around her, her glowing eye pierced into him. Cloud’s breath rasped in his lungs. The stench of mako and electrical fire clouded his thoughts.

 _“They hurt us Both of us”_

Her voice that was not a voice, her words that were not words. Images of the lab. Hojo silhouetted against green light. Scalpels, needles, needles full of burning green. Buried memories and nightmares, mixed.

 _“He hurt us Hurt you Hurt them Only rats to him Experiments”_ Zack, floating in the tank next to him. Aerith in a tube of glass and steel. JENOVA in Hojo’s lab, in her own tube, her own tank. She was just another victim, just like them.

He clenched his eyes shut, blinked them open again, trying to clear the visions away. No, he couldn’t start thinking like that. She was not like them. “Shut up! Get out of my head!”

Why was Zack just standing there? Why hadn’t he swung his sword, broken the tank, broken her hold?

_“Let me help you Get revenge On him On Shinra.”_

Cloud gasped, “I don’t need your help.” His hands were shaking. The fusion swords were heavy. Why did he make them so heavy?

Gunshots. Glass breaking, fluid gushing out. Vincent firing. Please.

Her voice, not a voice, louder. _“They hurt the planet Their reactors Their army I can help.”_

He kept shaking his head, the pressure drowning out his own thoughts. “You. Hurt the planet.”

_“Planet hurt me Want to leave Stars Life out there Let me help you first For the planet For what’s yours What you deserve”_

“Not… interested.” His voice came out weak, desperate.

_“Kind child My child Protect the planet Keep it safe No more Shinra No more war no mako energy What you cherish saved Protected”_

Memories of his friends whirled in front of him, their faces far away, separated from him. He didn’t have his allies, couldn’t fight alone. She would help him, be his ally, give him the power and support him. 

“You’d…” He gasped for air. “You’d leave?”

_“Leave after For the stars Yes This world my child’s world”_

She would leave. Help him, then leave. Her eye glowed. Light, sincere. She looked almost like a human or a Cetra. “How can… I trust… you?”

_“Mothers do not lie Want to help you My child”_

She looked like his mother. Light floating hair, high cheekbones, he hadn’t realized her eye was blue… 

His swords slipped from his grasp. “Mother…”

Small hands wrapped around his bracer. He felt the sudden warmth of a materia activating, and it made him blink. The movement seemed slow, like his eyelids were moving at one quarter speed, but the static in his head dimmed, driven back slightly. He had just enough clarity to wrap his hand over Denzel’s, desperate energy flowing into his Master Materia. He followed it, his own energy coursing into the stone to produce a mastered Firaga spell.

The glass of JENOVA’s tank, already shattered by Vincent, was no barrier at all as the powerful spell engulfed it. Her fury and pain reverberated in his battered mind, screaming without screaming. He refused to let go of Denzel’s hand, using it as a lifeline as he cast again and again, until there was nothing left of the tank or her but melted slag.

He fell to his knees and pulled in a grateful sobbing breath. His mind was his own again, the pressure, the static, gone. His whole body shook. With watery arms, he pulled Denzel into an embrace. 

“Thank you, thank you.” The words were muffled, spoken into Denzel’s jacket. The boy’s skinny arms wrapped around him.

He wasn’t sure how long they knelt there, holding each other. At some point Zack came and joined them, throwing his own shaking arms around them. In the end, it was Vincent who got them up and out of the reactor. He shepherded them down the stairs again, walking them one by one through the laser traps, and taking out another set of drones when they were caught without a hiding place. He didn’t take them back down the tunnel, but out a side door. They were in no shape to go far. They hiked in silence out of the valley, partway up one of the twisted peaks surrounding it.

Vincent halted behind a gnarled outcropping of rock and surveyed the three of them. “Wait here,” he told them. “I will erase our tracks.” In a swirl of red, he vanished.

Cloud and Zack stood unmoving. Denzel, who’d been holding Cloud’s hand as they half-walked, half-climbed up the steep slope, tightened his grip, but stayed quiet.

Finally, Zack stretched, cracking his neck and rolling his shoulders. His voice was too cheerful. “So, who wants food?”

“Zack… You don’t have to pretend to be okay.” Cloud still felt almost numb. He’d known what she would do, he’d thought. Had gone in, he thought, with his guard well up. But it hadn’t mattered. JENOVA had stripped all his barriers down and shown him that he hadn’t healed at all. That he was just as weak, as vulnerable as ever. Useless. Unreliable. Dangerous. If Denzel had acted a moment later, it would’ve been too late.

“I’m not,” Zack cut into his thoughts. “And I don’t expect any of us to be. But food makes things better, so let’s eat.”

He pulled trail mix and leftover sausage from a backpack and flopped cross-legged onto the ground. He held up the bag of trail mix, offering. 

Denzel, less blind out here with the reactor lights glowing below them, detached from Cloud to take a handful of nuts and dried fruit. Cloud stayed rooted to the spot. He wanted to run. The risk of JENOVA was gone, but he was still pathetic. He was too weak to be of use to them, to hold up under their regard, their affection, their needs.

But when Denzel held the bag out to him, he took a reluctant step forward. He had promised Tifa that he’d be better. No matter how much of a failure he felt, how certain he was at this moment that Zack would do all right, be better off, even, without him, he couldn’t leave Denzel. He’d broken his trust before, running away and hiding while the Geostigma ate them both alive, and he wouldn’t do it again.

Vincent reappeared as they were finishing, saying only, “We should keep moving.”

Zack jumped back to his feet, dusting off his hands. Denzel pushed to his feet, clearly tired, but ready to go. Cloud rose more slowly, reslinging his swords. “Vincent.” He owed something to the gunman. He hadn’t talked about Lucrecia back at the manor. It was a card he hadn’t known how to play, and he’d been afraid of saying the wrong thing.

He knew only the bare outlines of what Lucrecia meant to Vincent, what the look on his pale face meant when he’d seen her frozen in crystal in the depths of the cave. Cloud wasn’t entitled to use it as leverage over the man, and he wasn’t going to keep it a secret. So he told him plainly - that Lucrecia was alive, in stasis, and where to find her.

For a long moment, Vincent’s eyes bore into Cloud’s. Looking for a hint of a lie, maybe, as though what Cloud was telling him was something he could barely allow himself to believe. Finally, some slight tension went out of him and he inclined his head slightly. “Thank you.” He said no more, only walked back into the night, vanishing out of their lives. Cloud, too worn-out for hope, thought it was probably permanent.

It was time to get off the mountain, before the reactor personnel discovered what had happened. Cloud carried Denzel piggyback. After a brief protest, the boy fell asleep on his shoulder. When they did stop again, hours later, it was in a narrow valley, not much more than a crack in the ground sloping away from the peaks, overhung with small and twisted pines. A clear shallow stream babbled over stones, raising watery echoes back from the valley walls. Little birds flew down to splash in it, shivering their wings and sending up small sprays of water. 

On the narrow shingle shore, Cloud slid Denzel down without waking him. He lay curled asleep next to Cloud, the warmth of his body pressing into his leg. Zack collected dry branches in the pines above, made a small fire for warmth, then sat within arms reach on Cloud’s other side. The slender column of smoke stretched up, nearly invisible against the low pale grey clouds.

“I’m thinking about what happened back there.”

“Zack, don’t -”

“I’m sorry. I saw you were having trouble, and I -” He glanced over at Cloud. “I should’ve called it off. I should’ve got us out of there. But I thought I could handle it, that I could take out JENOVA . That I could do it before…”

Hearing Zack apologize for _Cloud’s_ lack of control sent ice chasing down his spine. “What happened wasn’t your fault.”

Zack made a face, poking at the fire with a long stick. “I froze. I was useless. _You_ took her out.”

Cloud looked down. His whole body crawled with distress, cold and clammy, except where Denzel lay against him. He brushed his hand lightly over the kid’s hair. “Just barely. Only because he was there to pull me back.”

Zack half-grinned. “He’s a brave kid, isn’t he?” The expression faded and a haunted look came into his eyes. “But it made me think about Sephiroth.”

Cloud’s hands clenched. His heart was loud in his ears. Zack was staring at the fire and didn’t see the look on his face.

“When he snapped. Why he snapped. He told me, you know, he was going to leave Shinra.” The muscles in Zack’s throat worked. “I thought about it, a lot, in the lab. How much better everything would’ve been, if he’d just left _before_ we did the mission. And, today, I heard her in my head, Cloud, the things she said…” The flames reflected, dancing, in his unblinking eyes. “I wanted it. With her help, I could protect everyone. Be the hero I always wanted to be. And now I keep thinking of Seph. What did she say to him? What did she promise _him_?”

“Zack! Please, just stop. Not now.”

“One more thing, then I promise I’ll drop it.” He looked at Cloud and his blue eyes were bleak. “You’ve gotta let me apologize. I haven’t been much help to you when you need me. I’m sorry.”

Disbelief hammered a frantic tune in Cloud’s head. “What?” He looked away, twisting the bracer on his wrist in a nervous, unconscious movement, and looked back. “ _You_ got us out of the labs. You got us to Midgar, halfway across the world, with Shinra on our tail. You fucking _died_ because of me, if you hadn’t been dragging me around, you’d’ve made it -”

“I’d have died before then.” Zack reached out, set his hand on the back of Cloud’s neck. “I couldn’t have got out without you. If you hadn’t told me your Nibelheim stories, I would’ve died in these mountains. If I hadn’t had you to talk to, I’d’ve gone nuts. There were days I was _willing_ to give up and die, except you’d be alone if I did.” 

He smiled, a shallow expression, like it was painted on the surface of his face. “I couldn’t do anything to help you get better. You only managed that once I was gone. And I couldn’t save your home, and I got my ass kicked and made you do my job. This time, just like last time. I was useless.”

Cloud’s head shook, denying, denying. Zack’s hand tightened, like he was trying to stop the movement, so Cloud said, “It was a fluke that I won back then. I never could’ve done it without you fighting him first. And I couldn’t have beat her today, either, except for Denzel.”

“But you won,” Zack persisted. “Today and back then, and a bunch of times I never saw. You saved the planet. Me, I worked for the killers and I wasn’t going to leave, until they made me. Even Seph was smarter about it than me. I just kept burying my head, trying to pretend that so long as I had SOLDIER, I could make everything else work out. And then you - Everything I screwed up in my life, you turned around and fixed it.”

His hand on Cloud’s neck felt burning hot, like an iron laid across the cold skin. “I made work for you, that you had to undo without me.”

“No,” Cloud protested, and it came out almost as a moan. His skin crawled with chills. Hearing his hero confess his faults… it made him feel ill. 

Zack gazed at him for a long moment, then ran his hand up the back of Cloud’s head to ruffle his hair. It was a rough gesture, rattling Cloud’s head on his neck, but when Zack pulled away, he looked livelier and brighter again. He looked down at Denzel and smiled.

“What kind of nine year old runs into that sort of mess and, untrained, tries to use materia for the first time?”

Cloud didn’t say anything. His racing heart slowed as relief came over him. Relief that the conversation was over, and that whatever darkness had come over Zack had passed. Finally, he mustered, “I think it says bad things about my parenting skills.”

“Nah. I think you make a pretty great dad. It’s easy to see how much he looks up to you. Tries to be like you.” His eyes sought Cloud’s again. “You shouldn’t beat yourself up about today. You’re brave. And as tough as old boots.” He shoved Cloud’s shoulder lightly. “And if you mope around about it, you’ll set the kid a bad example.”

The ghost of a smile flickered across Cloud’s face. “Yeah. Wouldn’t want that.”

The two sat in silence, occasionally adding another branch to the fire. The stream gurgled on. The birds appeared to be finished with their morning baths, and though they could hear occasional cheeps and twitters from above, none of the birds came back into the valley. Cloud tried just to watch the water run, but epiphany seemed to be trickling through his mind, cold as the ice melt.

“Zack?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m…” His body sagged with tiredness, but his mind felt clear. “Most of what you said, you’re wrong. I only could do what I did because I was lucky, and because of my friends. But I…”

Zack’s frown indicated he was ready to argue, but was waiting for Cloud to finish his thoughts first.

Cloud said, the words bitter on his tongue, “I am the one who stopped Sephiroth. Other people put me in the position to do it, and I did it. It’s… exhausting, to be the one who always does it, but I…” He looked down, the realization a knot in his belly. “But I’ll never not be the one. When there’s a threat, I’ll always fight it.”

JENOVA had preyed on his hatred for Shinra and his love for those he cared about, had tried to use his reliance on others as bait, but those very same things were what gave him the strength to fight. It was Denzel’s desperate grab that had jarred him enough to latch on to those feelings. The fear and the love that Denzel had been feeding into his materia gave him the strength to break free of her. 

Zack was right that Cloud was the strong one, and admitting it felt disloyal, but it also lit a flame of boyish pride in his chest. That he’d achieved that level. But Cloud was right, too - he only won because he had the support of others. His tendency to isolate himself, to run away or wall himself off, had always been a hindrance, not a strength. With a touch of grief, he thought, _I keep learning the same lesson. And always, Tifa was right._

He held his hand out to Zack, palm up. “I’ll fight. And I don’t want to do it alone. So… stick with me?”

So he would fight. For however long he needed to he would fight to protect those close to him.

He was asleep when Zack scooted next to him, whispering into his hair. “You protect the whole world. That’s what makes you amazing, storm bringer.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hoo boy, there’s a lot to unpack in this chapter. 
> 
> Denzel rushing into the reactor core and trying to use Cloud’s materia is a nod to him trying to attack Bahamut Sin barehanded. The kid has guts.
> 
> FUBAR is “Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition/Repair”


	6. Home is where the heart is

“You done with Bugenhagen?” Zack, seated on a wooden bench in the inn’s common room, had been trying his best to savor the local bourbon, but it seemed watery and tasteless - until Cloud entered, stopping at the door to knock dust off his boots. The burn of it caught up abruptly, then, making him wheeze out the question.

Cloud gave him a faintly concerned look as he sat down across the table from him and Denzel. “For now. What are you doing?”

Zack grinned and took another sip of the heavy, woodsmokey liquor. It wasn’t bad, actually. Meanwhile, Denzel looked up from his magazine and moaned, “He’s making me read this boring magazine.”

“It’s not _that_ boring,” Zack protested. He pinched the spine of it and tilted it in Denzel’s hands so Cloud could see the cover. “Special issue from some travel agency, all about Cosmo Canyon. It was in the lobby. I’m making Denzel read it to me for educational purposes,” he explained.

“Oh.” Guilt flickered across Cloud’s face. “Guess I have let your schoolwork slip.”

Denzel raised and dropped his shoulders in a very Cloud-like way. “It’s fine. I already know how to read.”

“Okay then, what’s that word?” Zack pointed.

“Unique. We did that one already.”

“And this one?”

“ _E-co-log-ic-al_ , ecological.” Denzel gave him a pleading look, but Zack only nodded, encouraging him to keep going. “ _Com-mun-it-ies_ , communities filled with _en-end-em-mic_ -” He stumbled.

“Endemic,” Zak said, though frankly, if Denzel hadn’t started the word, he wasn’t sure he could have recognized it.

Denzel finished, “Endemic plants and wildlife.”

“Right. So what does all of that mean?”

“Umm, something about a group of plants and animals?”

“Yep. It’s talking about rare plants and animals found only in this area.”

“Okay, that’s great,” Denzel shut the magazine and pushed it away, “can I be done now that Cloud’s here?”

Zack glanced over at Cloud, who tapped a thoughtful finger on the table. “Well, you can help me with some of the math on the windmill schematics I’m drawing up for Reeve.”

“Clooouuud,” Denzel whined. He drooped so dramatically that his forehead hit the table with a ‘clunk’.

Zack chuckled. “Hang in there, champ.” Cloud was frowning at Denzel, but it was a distant, distracted expression. His thoughts weren’t entirely with them. Zack prodded, “What happened to the plan, not doing Shinra-related things?”

Cloud came partly back into focus, but not entirely. “The reactors are bad for the planet, Zack. I want to get started on this now and there’s no place better than Cosmo Canyon.”

“Yeah, but…” He cut off the rest of his protest, realizing he was whining. Cloud had been holed up with that old man Bugenhagen practically every waking minute since they arrived. Zack had been killing time by restocking their supplies and running a few monster-hunting errands, but after years, at least from Zack’s perspective, of being together all the time, his days felt weird and hollow without Cloud nearby.

“You’ve been working hard. How about we take a lunch break and go explore the canyons? You know, make it a picnic. Scenic views, cool rock formations.” He waved a hand at the magazine. “Show Denzel the stuff he’s been reading about.”

“Maybe later.”

“Spike, you can do plans and stuff at night. Right now, it’s nice outside. Relax and let’s have some fun. Right, Denzel?”

“Uhh...” The boy looked between the two of them, conflict on his face. Zack was learning how to read him too. He didn’t want to go against Cloud, but he’d take any excuse to put off math lessons. “I know the reactors and windmills are really important but… it’d only be an hour or two, right?”

“Right! Just to get out and do things together. Denzel and I haven’t seen much of you since we got here.” Shoot. Still sounded kind of whiny.

Cloud ran a frustrated hand through his hair but in the end, relented. “Fine. A few hours won’t hurt.”

“Great!” He jumped up. “I’ll order us something to go. Be right back.” He hurried to the old man at the inn counter and asked for some food that’d be good on a hike.

The man scratched at his scraggly beard, musing. “Well, I’ve got some tamales made up. They travel well. Or I could wrap up some poyha or nokake. They’re a bit more fragile, but if they fall apart, they’ll still taste plenty fine.”

“No idea what any of that is. I’ll take some of each.”

The old man showed him a map with places of special interest or beauty pointed out. He selected a spot not too close, but not too far out either. When offered the map, he waved it off. He could remember the way.

Back at the table, Cloud had taken up reading with Denzel. “Alright, guys, let’s head off.”

Denzel, full of enthusiasm, leapt from the bench. Zack snickered. The kid was rarely boisterous and it was fun to watch. Even Cloud, who he could see was still kinda grumpy, was amused. 

“So, where we headed?” Cloud asked once they were outside.

Zack winked at him. “Follow me and I’ll show you.”

Hiking for fun was different from the mile-eating traveling they normally did. Sure, both he and Cloud were still armed but they weren’t looking for trouble. Their pace was leisurely and they would stop to enjoy the views of red sandstone and oddly shaped hoodoos. They took time to explain to Denzel how wind and water had shaped the rocks, pointing out how each different colored layer represented a different era of history. Denzel soaked up the attention, much more interested in learning out here than reading from the magazine. Zack couldn’t help grinning - he remembered being the same.

Zack found the spot he’d been leading them to: a large natural bridge of arching rock framing a cloudless and vibrantly blue sky, and a lone twisted pine growing at its base. From beneath it they had a perfect view of the canyon they’d hiked through, stretching away beneath them. Needles rustled in a gentle breeze, and the scent of warm pine, sage, and sun-baked stone mixed with the smell of cooked corn and spiced meat as he unwrapped their food.

Tamales, it turned out, were a type of cornmeal stuffed with spicy meat and wrapped in a dry corn husk. Poyha was something like a turkey meatloaf with bacon, corn, onions, and green grapes mixed in, and nokake was a purplish-blue corn cake. 

The tamales reminded him of the spicy foods he’d grown up on. Definitely his favorite. Denzel nibbled at all three, while Cloud stuck to the poyha and nokake.

Zack held one of the tamales out to him, half unwrapped. “Come on. You really need to try these.”

“I can smell the spice from here, Zack.”

Zack grinned. “I know. That’s the best part.”

Cloud just shook his head. 

Denzel took a drink of water, evidently waiting to see if Cloud would say anything more, then explained for him. “Cloud doesn’t like spicy things.”

Zack felt taken aback. “Why not? It’s the best flavor.”

“Hot is not a flavor,” Cloud said flatly.

“Sure, it is.”

“No, it’s _not_. Some of us weren’t raised on foods that dissolved our tongues.”

“My tongue’s not dissolved.” He stuck it out for emphasis.

Cloud rolled his eyes, taking another bite of the poyha. Zack let it go, filing Cloud’s dislike for spicy foods away. A pair of crows flew overhead, squabbling with each other. Distantly, Zack could hear the activities of daily life in Cosmo Canyon, but the crows, Denzel and Cloud eating, and the rustling pine needles were the only sounds nearby. He lay back on the bronze rock, hands behind his head. Peaceful place, this. After a few minutes, a lizard came out from a crack in the stone to bask in the sun, the same way Zack was.

“We should head back.”

“Hmm?” Cloud’s sudden statement jerked Zack out of his half-nap.

“There’s still so much to do.” Cloud was looking at his hands, brows furrowed.

Zack sat up. “There’s no need to rush. It’s not like Shinra is going to _accept_ your windmill designs. Where’d you learn to design them, anyway?”

“I don’t care if Shinra likes them or not, mako’s not sustainable. The sooner the reactors are shut down, the better.”

He couldn’t help it, he snorted. “Right, like that’ll ever happen. People can’t live without mako energy.”

Cloud frowned at him. So did Denzel. He wondered if they realized how alike they looked sometimes. Cloud said, “ _We_ managed. It wasn't pretty for awhile, but… Even when Rufus was picking up the pieces after Shinra collapsed, he didn’t bother starting them back up.”

Zack grimaced. Why did everything come back to Shinra? He reached over and poked Cloud in the thigh. “You didn’t answer how you learned about them.”

Cloud waved Zack’s finger away with a quick flap of his hand, like he was brushing away a fly. “Started ferrying plans between Reeve with the WRO and Barret. He was all hot on oil and coal, ‘cause they were what he knew, but once the canyon got involved, it looked like wind, solar, and geothermal were going to be the next big things.”

Denzel piped up. “Why’re you doing wind?”

“It’s the easiest to get started on,” Cloud half-shrugged. He stood and looked out over the canyon. The intermittent breeze toyed with the edges of his clothing and tugged at the blond strands that fell in his face. He put a hand on one shoulder and rolled it, stretching before he reholstered his swords.

He was beautiful, illuminated and surrounded by bright blue sky. Zack had thought Cloud was cute since their first meeting, and he still thought so. The frustrated chocobo look never got old, and neither did the startled wide eyed and innocent look Cloud could still somehow pull off.

He hadn’t said or done anything about it, from when they first met, to the times they’d bumped into each other afterward, to the lab, or while they were on the run. He’d had Aerith, after all. Even if he’d had some inclination to cheat, with the excuse of loneliness or desperation, Cloud had been younger than him, lower-ranked, and then sick and dependent. To go after him with those issues hanging over things, it would’ve been like Zack was taking advantage of him.

Now, though… He no longer had Aerith. And Cloud had grown up. There was a new beauty in his strength and resilience. The way he fought and walked like a wolf or coeurl, confident and secure in his surroundings. And aside from his JENOVA-induced breakdown a month ago, mostly secure in himself too.

Too bad he didn’t know if Cloud even swung that way. On the other hand, no harm testing the waters. “You know, the way the light’s hitting you, you look like a model on a magazine cover.”

Cloud shot him an annoyed look. “I’m serious, Zack. If we’re going to get the reactors shut down, we’ll need a viable alternative.”

Not one to be deterred easily, Zack stretched out one more time before gathering himself and flipping to his feet in a practiced move that used to impress Aerith. 

Denzel gave a startled little “whoa,” but Cloud didn't look impressed. “Ready?”

“Yep.”

They gathered up their trash. Pack it in, pack it out, right? On the way back, he thought of how best to approach Cloud. It wasn’t that he’d been turned down, it was just that Cloud was oblivious to Zack’s attempts at flirtation. Zack knew he had himself partly to blame for that. He already joked and chatted and complimented and touched Cloud casually. And… He glanced sideways down at Denzel. He wasn’t quite sure whether he wanted to be as straightforward about it as he usually was.

He wanted to be part of this family, not make things awkward if he got rejected. He didn’t want to lose them or mess up what he already had. Or what they had, either. 

Except Cloud still didn’t view himself as Denzel’s dad, just his guardian. Maybe, if Zack wanted in on this relationship, he should make sure their bond was rock solid first.

The trail widened as it got closer to the village, and soon the three of them could walk side by side. He looped one arm around Cloud’s neck and set his other hand on Denzel’s shoulder. “Y’know, when I was growing up, my folks used to take me hiking up to the local waterfalls. We’d make a day of it, picnicking, fishing, swimming, picking whatever wild fruit was in season. This kinda reminds me of that.”

“We only had a picnic,” Denzel pointed out.

Zack nodded sagely. “True. That means we need to go on more family outings. We can go camping and exploring.”

They both gave him nonplussed looks. “Don’t we do that already?”

“Oh. Yeah. Guess that is kinda our lifestyle. So maybe movies, surfing, snowboarding. Oh! We could go to arcades!” It’s been so long since he’d been to one, he couldn’t remember the last time. It’d been in Midgar, he remembered that at least.

Cloud chuckled. “You would’ve liked the Gold Saucer.”

“The what now?”

“The Gold Saucer. It was a… destination place. Somewhere to blow off steam and have fun. It doesn’t exist yet. Hopefully it won’t exist at all.” Cloud spent the majority of the hike back describing the place. He hoped Dio was as entruperial as Cloud said, and would build somewhere else, because that sounded like an excellent place to go have fun.

* * *

June in the Gongaga jungle was hot and humid enough that even Zack was uncomfortable. Cloud and Denzel were straight-up miserable, with sweat rolling down their faces and darkening their clothes. To make matters worse, the humid air buzzed with biting flies and mosquitos.

“Why doesn't the Enemy Away work on these things?” Denzel moaned from his saddle.

Zack smashed one of the bloodsuckers between his hands. “There was a guy back in Gongaga who used to sell this super effective bug spray. He was basically the richest guy in town ‘cause everybody bought some.”

Denzel tried to copy him and clap a bug between his hands. He missed, dropping his reins in the process. Snatching them back up, he pleaded, “Can we please get some?”

Zack considered it. “Well, we’re not that far. I don’t see why we can’t stop in. Cloud?” He tilted his head, deferring to the other. “What do you think?”

Cloud reined his bird to a stop beside him and regarded them both. His bangs stuck to his flushed face, and there was a pink welt on one cheek where he hadn’t been fast enough to kill one of the biters. After a moment, he nodded, “Sure.”

Zack smiled softly. He reached over to clear the stuck strands from Cloud’s face, tucking the hair behind his ear. His hand lingered there as he fought down the urge to caress Cloud’s flushed cheek. Cloud didn’t push away his hand or move apart, but tucked his chin and avoided eye contact. It was hard to tell if any of the color in his cheeks was from a blush or if it was just the humidity, but the expression was bashful and cute.

A loud slap echoed through the damp air. Zack jerked back, turning to look at Denzel, who was observing them with a blank expression. He held up his hand, a smashed mosquito displayed on his palm. “Can we get that bug spray now?”

Zack ran a self-conscious hand through his hair. “Heh, yeah. Let’s go.”

He led the way to the secluded village. It’d been years since he’d been home, but the criss-crossing animal paths on the jungle floor were still familiar. Two hourse later, they began to pass small fields cleared for crops, small herds of goats, water buffalo, or a few hogs. Shortly thereafter, the round mud houses of Gongaga village became visible.

Before they stepped onto the main road, Cloud reached over and grabbed one of his reins. “Zack, are you sure about this? What if your parents see you?”

“Yeah.” He knew Cloud hadn’t wanted to see his own family, but... “I’m sure. Actually I’m thinking of stopping in.”

Cloud frowned.

“Don’t worry! I won’t say anything to give the game away. And I haven’t seen them since I was thirteen, they’re not likely to recognize me.” He smiled ruefully, looking down at the blue tiled roofs nestled among the lush vegetation. “I dunno if you remember, I tried stopping by when we were on the run, but Cissnei turned me away. I mean, I know there’s no reason for them not to be doing okay. Gongaga is this quiet little place that never changes. But I want to see them.” 

Both Denzel’s parents had died. Cloud had only ever known his mother, and then lost her. Zack had always taken his for granted. He’d left, and he’d never called, and he’d only written once. He was such an idiot. He didn’t regret leaving, but he should have stayed in contact.

Cloud let go of the rein. “Okay.” He’d gone reserved, but he wasn’t arguing. “Bug spray is at the general store?”

“Yeah.”

“Denzel and I’ll go get it. You visit your parents.”

With a whoop, Zack leaned far out of his saddle to wrap Cloud in a headlock. “You're the best!”

“Zack!” Cloud’s protest was echoed by the chocobos’ squawks of alarm as their riders became suddenly unbalanced. 

Laughing, he resettled himself in the saddle and stroked his bird’s neck to calm the drake down. “Hey, while you’re there, can you buy some bulla, coco bread, grater brute or goiabada? I haven’t had any of those in ages.”

Cloud, calming his own bird, raised an eyebrow. “All of that?”

His grin was unapologetic. “They don’t always carry the same thing, so I’m covering my bases.”

Cloud’s expression softened into a fond smile. “Sure. I’ll see what I can find.”

They split as they entered the village, Cloud and Denzel heading for the small cluster of shops and services, while Zack turned his bird down the familiar lane towards his childhood home. Barefoot children ran past him and iridescent jungle fowl darted in and out of the brush. The perfume of flowers and growing fruit sweetened the air, and somewhere nearby, someone was grilling marinated meat. So many strong and pleasant scents, almost covering the metallic tang of the reactor on the outskirts of town. Almost.

He wondered if it was the truth he knew about Shinra now or if it was Cloud’s dislike for mako energy that made the structure look so intrusive and out of place. It wasn’t that old, practically brand new, actually, and the jungle hadn’t started to wither. But he could see how the scene would change over eight years. The vivid plant life rotting, turning sparser and sicklier. The ground would show bare dirt and rock, instead of being covered by a thick layer of humus. And, of course, the explosion… Over half the town would die in it, their homes and shops wiped off the map in a single night. 

If he went around and told people the thing was going to blow in about nine years, they would probably say he was off his rocker or a fear-mongering tree-hugger. Well, if Cloud got his way (and Zack was going to help him do it) then the reactor would be shut down way before then. So, he was okay not thinking about it right now. He could focus on the present.

He’d arrived at a little house identical to all the rest but special to him. Funny, it always seemed bigger in his memories. He hadn’t thought a whole lot about this place while in Midgar, but stuck in the lab and listening to Cloud’s past he’d reflected back on his own childhood. He tied the chocobo’s reins to the post box and stood on the doorstep, nostalgia making his eyes tingle.

He knocked on the door. For a moment, nothing happened. Were they out? He couldn’t hear any movement inside. Then he heard footsteps on soil and his mom came from around the back side of the house to see who was at the door. She didn’t look much different from when he left. It threw him for a second. But of course she wouldn’t. It had only been two years since he left. For her, at least.

A warm grin spread across her face. It was contagious and he grinned back. His dad had always said he had his mom’s smile.

“Hey -” he had to swallow back the name _ma,_ “- you’re Zack Fair’s mom, right?”

That got her interest. “Yes?”

“Great to meet you. I’m a SOLDIER 1st. I was passing through town and thought I’d let you know how he’s doing.” He wasn’t thinking, just letting the words roll out of his mouth.

Her face lit up. “Oh! Come in and sit down. Do you want a drink? Is he doing okay?” 

She stepped past him to open the door, but he shook his head “I’d love nothing more, but I can’t stay long. So, umm…” He scratched the back of his head. What had he been doing at this point in time?

“So, Zack…” he started. “He’s a 2nd Class now, making his way through the ranks pretty fast. People call him a prodigy. I’m sure he’ll make 1st one day. Oh! He’s got a 1st Class mentoring him, so he’s in good hands.”

Being trained by Angeal had been the best thing to happen to him at this point. And would be for a while, until… Nope, not thinking about that right now.

“And… what else?” He rubbed his chin. “He’s got plenty of friends, so don’t worry about that. Gets along with just about everyone… gets into a little trouble now and again.”

She tensed, looking concerned. Zack laughed to put her back at ease. “It’s nothing big! It’s just, uh, when SOLDIERs get bored, we get up to some pretty off-the-wall shi- stuff.”

Her grin came back. “That’s good to hear. He ran off to chase his dreams, you know, and only left us a note.” She glanced away, raising a hand to smooth her hair down. “I wish he would’ve stayed home longer, but… It’s good to hear that at least someone’s looking after him.” A light caught in her eyes and she stepped forward. “Is he eating enough? Has he found anybody special? I wish you could stay longer and tell me all the details.”

Zack laughed “Don’t worry. Angeal keeps him out of too much trouble and yeah, he’s eating fine. Growing like a weed. And no, no one special yet.”

“That’s good. The last we’d heard was that he got into SOLDIER. And that was a congratulatory letter from the company. I’m glad you took the time to stop by - you tell him to write more.”

He winced internally. He’d just gotten so _busy_. When he’d had the time, he was too tired or didn’t think of it. Eventually, he’d just decided that no news was good news. Which, considering Shinra, was not the better option.

“Will do, ma’am. You and your husband are doing all right? Anything you want me to tell him?”

She patted his arm. “We’re doing hunky-dory. Just tell him we love him and are proud of him.”

Okay, he was really trying not to bawl now. “Will do. I should probably head out-” before I make a fool of myself, “- but, before I go, he told me to give you a hug for him.” He held out his arms questioningly.

His mom laughed and wrapped him in a big hug. The top of her untidy bun tickled his chin. She was so short, around the same size as Cloud. Just like the house, she had seemed much bigger before. Seriously trying not to cry, Zack pulled away, waving as he left.

Cloud and Denzel were waiting for him at the general store. He could tell by the smell that they’d used the bug spray. Cloud cocked his head inquiringly as Zack got near. “You okay?”

Was he? “Yeah, pretty happy actually. Got to see my mom. Even got a hug!”

Cloud rolled his eyes, but there was a little smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “ _Of course_ you did. She must be just like you.”

“We’ve got some similarities. Both pretty friendly. Both pretty.” He winked.

“Pretty hopeless,you mean.”

“Ouch.” He mimed being struck through the heart. “You’re so mean, Cloudy. But, really, I wish I could have introduced the two of you.”

Cloud ducked his head. “Maybe some other time.” He handed over a brown paper bag.

“It’s a date, then.” Zack peered inside to see the spiced bulla and folded-over coco bread, plus several sweet rolls he hadn’t put on the shopping list. “Thanks!”

“I picked up a small job. Won’t take too long. If you want to show Denzel around or something…” Cloud shrugged.

He looked up from the bag. “Sure. Okay. Denzel and I can hang out. Right, kiddo?”

Denzel regarded him with the same blank look as earlier. “Sure.”

Hoo boy. Zack gave him a sheepish smile. He’d definitely overstepped somewhere.

Cloud looked between them. “Okay. I’ll be back soon.”

Watching Cloud walk away was a bit awkward, but he rallied himself and turned to the kid. “Sooo, my family used to go fishing up near the falls, and I bet we could rent some poles from the store. Want to go?”

“Sure.”

Yeah, he was gonna have to figure this out.

Not until they were at the falls did he remember that Denzel didn’t like fish. Okay, so he really wasn’t doing hot at getting himself back within the boy’s good graces. “You know, if you’re not interested in fishing, we can do something else.”

The little boy pulled a face. “It’s fine as long as I don’t have to eat them.”

“Okay, but if you get bored or want to stop, let me know.”

He showed Denzel how to bait the hook and how to cast, then pointed out good spots that likely had fish and areas that were probably empty. Between casts, as they nibbled on the sweet buns, he told Denzel stories about growing up in Gongaga. Then, out of nowhere, Denzel said, “It’s okay.”

“Huh? What is?”

“If you want to date my dad. I mean, Cloud. I don’t mind. It’s…” He trailed off, ears bright red.

Zack’s jaw dropped. “Uhh… that’s… thanks?” It took him a moment to get his mind back up to speed. “That actually means a lot to me, that you’d be cool with me being part of the family.” He waited a minute, watching ripples on the water. “And you know, you should tell him that you think of him as your dad.”

Denzel’s ears turned an even brighter shade as he curled up, knees drawn to his ears. “I don’t wanna be a burden or presume too much.” 

Zack shook his head. “Man, you two. Tell him. It would mean a lot to him.”

“But what if he doesn’t want -”

He cut him off, knowing full well that those worries were nothing but self-doubt. “He’ll be over the moon.”

Denzel glanced up from between his knees, looking dubious.

Zack grinned, reaching over to ruffle his hair. “Trust me.”

They'd been fishing for three hours, and the tropical evening was setting in when Cloud showed up. “The store clerk said where to find you.” He dismounted and let his bird join theirs, grazing amiably under the lush canopy. 

Zack gave a lazy wave. “How was the job?”

“Simple, thanks to ribbon.”

“Touch Mes?”

Cloud nodded. “They’d moved into some of the fields. Turned some workers and livestock into frogs.”

He snickered. “Oh man, bet that was something. You made sure you didn’t kill anything you weren’t supposed to?”

With a tired sigh, Cloud sat down on the bank between him and Denzel, resting his arms on his knees. “I know the difference between a Touch Me and something that’s been amphibi-fied.”

“What did you do with everyone who’d been turned into frogs?” Denzel asked.

Cloud grimaced. “Gathered them up in a sack and dropped them off at the store. I’m not buying a maiden’s kiss for each of them. How about you two, caught anything?”

“Sure have. We’ve let most of ‘em go, but I kept a tambaqui for dinner.” Zack pulled on a rope that lay mostly submerged in the water, bringing the big sixty-something pound silvery fish on shore to show off. His mouth watered at the thought of barbecue fish ribs, because yes, that was a thing, and it seemed no one outside of the jungle had ever heard of it. He hadn’t been able to find any even in Midgar, a melting pot of culture and cuisine, which had been a real let down.

Now that Cloud was here, and since fishing wasn’t really Denzel’s scene, he suggested something different. “Hey, since it’s been a long day, let’s go swimming.”

“Here?” Denzel eyed the water they’d been fishing in, probably thinking about some of the larger fish Zack had pulled out, along with some the fish stories he’d heard during the afternoon.

“Nope. There’s some pools up above the falls, out of the current, that are pretty nice to just float around in.”

They gathered up the fishing gear and the fish before heading further up river. Carved out of bedrock, the pools were part of a creek that fed into the river. If the Nibel Mountains were a death trap just waiting to kill you, then the Gongagan jungle was almost a tropical paradise. The worst things the jungle could throw at you were diseases, so as long as you were stocked up on esuna, remedies, and bug spray, you’d probably be fine.

The water was cool, a pleasant contrast to the humid air, and did wonders to wash the days of dirt and sweat from their skin. Zack’s hair was flattened by the water, and so long that he flipped it over his face and played like a swamp monster attacking the other two. Cloud easily evaded him, strong muscles quickly sending him across the pool and his agility enabling him to make quick unexpected turns in the water.

When Zack got tired of chasing Cloud, he focused on Denzel. The boy, who had been laughing at them, gulped and tried to flee. Zack moved to intercept. They played cat and mouse for a bit, Zack not willing to use his enhanced strength for an unfair advantage. At last he pounced, tickling his prey. Denzel shrieked and splashed, calling for Cloud to help him.

When Cloud did swim over, Zack changed targets again. Turned out, even after all these years and enhancements, his friend was still ticklish. However, he was much stronger and broke away all too soon. Both his victims retreated onto the rocks. Sinking until he was eye level with the water, Zack glided over.

“Don’t even think about it, Zack,” Cloud warned. His lingering smile meant he wasn’t as sternly forbidding as he sounded.

Zack wasn’t quite sure what Cloud was warning him against, mainly because he hadn’t decided if he was going to splash them or drag them back in yet. As a response, he blew bubbles.

The other two edged away, glancing back at their gear on the bank. “I will throw your clothes into the water.” Cloud’s words moved from a warning to a threat.

With a pout, Zack stood. “You’re no fun. Can I at least come sit up there with you?”

“Can we trust you?” Denzel had all the offended dignity and doubt a nine-year-old could muster.

“Hey, SOLDIER’s honor.”

Cloud rolled his eyes, but he nodded and moved over to allow him up. The three sat there for a while, watching the stars appear, before dressing and heading back to town. They returned the fishing gear and Zack was able to talk to a cook from the only restaurant in town into grilling up the tambaqui for them. Denzel ordered marinated pulled pork instead.

While they ate, Cloud said he wanted to head for Mideel next. “There’s some great wild chocobos over there. That’s the next step in breeding for a gold.”

“Alright. Let’s stop by Banora, since it’s on the way. See if there are any dumbapples right now.”

“Dumb apples?” Denzel asked. Cloud looked equally confused.

“You don’t know about dumbapples?” A brief memory floated past him - Angeal on a moonlit Wutai trail, asking a similar question. “They kinda grow whenever they want, don’t have a real season. I… kinda have this weird nostalgic fondness for them. It’s not like - nevermind.” They were giving him odd looks. “They taste good,” he quickly reassured.

“Alright,” said Cloud. “If it’s important to you, we’ll go.”

“Sooo, I also have some good news.” He waited with an impish grin for Cloud to take the bait. 

Eventually, he did. “And that is…?”

“Denzel,” he proclaimed, “has given me permission to date his dad.”

Denzel groaned and his quickly reddening face behind his hands. “You’re _embarassing..!_ ”

Zack held his breath, watching Cloud’s reaction. At first, he didn’t seem to get it, looking back and forth between the two of them, his eyebrows knitting together in delicate confusion. Then - finally! - his eyes widened. Pink filled his cheeks and spread up his ears, though he tried to brush it off and seem unaffected.

“I… Thanks. Both of you. I… Are you sure?”

“What? That I’m in love with you? Or that Denzel wants to call you his dad? I’m sure.” He looked at Denzel. “You?”

Denzel, face contorted, looked at Cloud from between his fingers. “Uh, if you don’t want to… that’s fine.

“No, Denzel, of course…” Cloud swallowed, then set a hand on Denzel’s back. “Of course I want to be your dad. It...” he seemed to fish for words, “It means a lot that you would want me.” 

The boy erupted from his chair, hugging him fiercely. Cloud, gently, tenderly, wrapped his arms around his son. 

Zack watched and stayed quiet. His nerves were jangling like live wires, waiting for Cloud’s answer to Zack’s half of the questions, but he wanted this moment to have its due, and he couldn’t help the soppy smile creeping across his face.

Denzel pulled back eventually. He had tears and snot on his face, but he asked, “What about Zack?”

They both looked at him. He clapped his hands in front of him, and gave his best puppy dog smile. Cloud smiled back, soft and sideways, and Denzel snorted out a hiccup-y kind of laugh. “You wanna go out?” Zack asked.

Cloud looked away for a second, blinking away tears. He looked back, his face almost lit from inside and his smile hopelessly fond. “Yeah.”

Grinning like a loon, Zack let out a whoop and rushed to their side of the tale to wrap them in a boisterous hug. Denzel squawked, “You’re squishing me!” but his free hand latched onto Zack’s sweater. Cloud sighed against Zack and his hand ran up to hold the back of his neck. “You just keep surprising me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love to cook, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the different types of food and cuisine around Gaia. Nibelheim and its surrounding area I base off of German and Hungarian food, thus Cloud didn’t grow up with spicy food, and doesn’t have a high tolerance for it. Zack however is from Gongaga, a tropical area where I headcanon there as having Cajun, Creole, and Caribbean like food, and was therefore raised on a hot and spicy cuisine. BBQ tambaqui fish ribs are a real thing and supposed to taste really good. I hope to try them one day.


	7. Ray of Sunshine

(In the past for six months. July, Costa del Sol.)

The ocean was shallow and sun-warmed for miles along the Costa Del Sol coastline. White sea-daffodils grew among the sawgrass scattered over the dunes. Among the bars, restaurants, and beach shops catering to tourists, grew imported oleander, hibiscus, and bougainvillea. 

Cloud sat under the shade of a palm tree, on a beach towel so big it was better called a blanket, and watched Denzel building a giant sand castle with five other kids. They had built turrets and towers and were hard at work digging the moat. They chattered and bossed each other happily around, and glanced with wide and awestruck eyes at the swords beside Cloud and Zack. The Buster stuck proudly out of the sand, and the Fusion Swords lay basking on their own towel. (Cloud hadn’t wanted to spend all night cleaning grit out from between the blades and gears.)

Currently, he was talking to Zack about their chocobos. The hens had just laid eggs in the rented stalls. It would take about a month for them to hatch, and the resulting chicks would grow fast. By mixing the blood lines of the good birds from the Corel desert and the great birds from Mideel, he was hoping the chicks would hatch as blues or greens.

“So, no more catching and training yellows?”

Cloud shook his head. “To get blacks, we still need the best yellows. They’re found up north, but worth the effort. Fast, responsive, quick to train. As good as you can get for yellows.”

“You sure got around to doing a lot of stuff, huh? Breeding chocobos and racing them. Stealing an airship, stealing a submarine. Going to space. I used to think of myself as a world traveler, but you’ve got me solidly beat.”

That made Cloud laugh. “Yeah. We got up to a lot.” He trailed his fingers over the colorful terrycloth. He wondered how the other timeline was doing. Were they okay? Were things peaceful and settled, or was there a new crisis? He hoped they were happy, and that the worst they had to face was whatever new scheme Yuffie had come up with. Well, that was unfair. The hyperactive ninja was only slightly more responsible for than he and Cid for dragging the others into messes. 

That reminded him. “Did I tell you I bought the Shinra beach house?”

Zack, who had been lounging with his hands behind his head, sat up. Gleeful surprise broke across his face. “No!”

His lip twitched up into a small smirk. “I still have the key for it.” They were on his key ring, alongside the ones for Fenrir and the rebuilt Seventh Heaven.

“No way.” Zack shook his head and chuckled. “How’d you manage that?”

“The world was ending and I had the gi, so I figured, why not?”

“That has got to be the world's most expensive impulse buy.”

“Real estate was really cheap at the time.” he defended.

Zack snorted. “I bet.” His eyes took on a much more contemplative look, his grin turning wicked “We should go there instead of back to the hotel. Our own private beach house, probably with a fully stocked bar. It’s got a hot tub, right?

Cloud shook his head. “We’re not going.”

“I know, but picture it. Drinks in our hands, out in the spa, all the privacy we could want…” Zack put a suggestive hand on Cloud’s thigh, thumb rubbing suggestive circles through the thin fabric of his newly purchased swim trunks.

His pulse sped up. “Zack…” 

“Hmm?” His boyfriend’s eyes were dark and sparkling.

He tried to remember what security was like at the beach house. Would it be possible? They wouldn’t have to spend the night. Just… a few hours, far away from thin hotel walls and the crowds of tourists...

“Hey, dad?” 

Zack’s hand, which had been gliding higher, yanked away. Cloud snapped his head over to see Denzel running to them. He took a steadying breath, willing his pulse back under control. “What’s up?”

Denzel stopped at the towel’s edge. “Can I have some gil for shaved ice?”

“Sure.” Cloud snagged his wallet from their pile of gear and handed over a few gil. “Having fun?”

“Yeah.” Denzel nodded vigorously, then glanced over his shoulder at the sun-tanned and laughing kids waiting for him. “Hey, they offered to teach me how to surf. Is that okay? I need a board.”

“Sure. I know how, too, so if you decide you like it, I can keep teaching you.

The boy’s face lit up. “Cool, thanks!” He spun on his heel, sending up a spray of sand, ready to run off, but Cloud stopped him.

“You should put on more sunscreen.” The skin acrosss Denzel’s shoulders was rosy from the sun and his freckles much more evident. Cloud didn’t want him burning.

“I’m fine,” he whined, looking over at the other kids again.

Cloud was already digging out the lotion. “It will only take a moment.”

Denzel shifted from foot to foot impatiently while Cloud put it on him, then beat feet. The gaggle of kids ran off as soon as he joined them, bulling their way through a flock of resting seagulls, which flew off in an fury of offended shrieks.

“This is so much nicer than when I was here before,” Zack sighed, watching them go.

“What happened before?”

“Oh, there was a while they kept forcing me to take leave, and they’d always send me here. But I’ve got, like, the best luck. Or worst luck, depending. I kept running into monsters. I used to beat ‘em up with a beach umbrella.”

Cloud snorted. “You're nearly as bad as Yuffie when it comes to getting into trouble.” 

“Hey, I don’t go looking for it. It just happens.”

He lay back and closed his eyes. “Whatever,” but there was an uptick to his mouth.

The sound of waves on sand and the conversations of other beachgoers washed over him in much the same way as the salt breeze. He didn’t like crowds, but they were seated far back from the main press. If he focused on the waves and the wind, he could pretend they were almost alone.

A finger poked him in the cheek. “Hm?”

“Nothing. Just wanted to say thanks for coming back to get me.”

His eyes snapped open to the brilliant blue above. The guilt of leaving Zack behind in the first place, of forgetting him, caught in his chest. Before he could do anything, say anything, Zack lay back down beside him. He tucked Cloud’s head under his chin and threw an arm over his chest, murmuring into his hair. “I love you so much.”

Silent tears stung in his eyes without falling. He turned into Zack’s embrace, wanting to ask why? What had he done to deserve Zack’s love? But he held the words back and held on, listing to Zack’s heart beat, the waves, and the gulls. Both the sun and Zack’s warmth soaked into him. Both the sand and Zack’s body held him. 

He didn’t understand why Zack loved him, didn’t understand how he’d managed to acquire this peace, but he was grateful. For Zack. For Denzel. For this second chance. He whispered back, “Thank you.”

They did sneak into the beach house.

* * *

A few nights later, the trio were seated on the patio of a restaurant along the strand. They’d pushed the dishes from their shrimp fritter appetizer and Cloud’s red gazpacho soup to the side as they worked on their main course. Denzel had bitten into his deep fried pork, ham and cheese roll with a satisfying-sounding crunch, and steam rose from a stretching string of gooey cheese as the kid leaned back, fighting to separate it from the roll. 

Cloud watched with a small smile while munching his salted fish skewers, simple, but a favorite of the locals. Zack observed them both but couldn’t quite find it in himself to smile. He didn’t want to ruin the mood, since he was just worrying over something he couldn’t control. 

He normally had a big appetite but was only picking at his paella, pushing mussels and clams around the golden saffron rice. Shouldn't have done that, it tipped Cloud off.

His boyfriend set down his skewer. “What’s wrong?”

Zack sighed, twirling a shrimp tail ruefully in his fingers. “Vacation’s up tomorrow.”

“Vacation?” Denzel muttered around a huge bite. “Didn’t you have a job this morning?”

“It’s a working vacation,” he amended. “And it’s not that. I’ve had my six months off. Tomorrow we start worrying about the future and how to change it.” How to right wrongs and prevent tragedy, all while dodging Shinra.

Cloud looked down at his food with a thoughtful frown. “Then don’t worry about it tonight.”

Zack chuckled. This was such a role reversal. “Yeah, but it’s kinda hard not to.” He poked at a jumbo-sized shrimp. “There’s so much to do, I don’t even know where to begin.”

They were all quiet, likely thinking of what they had to do. Man, he hadn’t meant to be such a downer. Denzel looked up abruptly, eyes alight. “Let’s set off fireworks!”

“Huh?”

“You talked about wanting to set off fireworks yesterday, after seeing those people on the beach doing it. So why not?” Denzel looked between him and Cloud, checking for approval.

His lips quirked up. “A final celebration?”

“No… the first of many.” Cloud had that familiar determined look in his eyes, but it was paired with a tender smile. The sweet beauty of it stole Zack’s breath away, and a delighted grin spread slowly across his face as warmth filled his chest. 

“Look at both of you! Being the optimists! Alright, it’s firework time!”

He was halfway out of his seat, off to go buy the explosives, when Cloud stopped him, voice full of fond exasperation. “Finish your food, Zack.”

He plopped back down, grinning. “Yes, sir.” He practically inhaled his paella, leaving tomorrow's worries for tomorrow.

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know most people write Costa Del Sol as tropical but it’s not equatorial so I’m going with mediterranean. Taking cues from Europe’s summer travel destinations of southern/eastern Spain, southern Italy, and Greece.
> 
> Cloud strikes me as the sort to not say I love you that often and when on the receiving end normally says thanks or asks why depending on the situation.
> 
> To those wondering about the food the shrimp fritters are Tortillitas de camarones, Denzel has Flamenquito and Cloud’s eating Espetos.


	8. Where there’s a will, there’s a way

(In the past for a full six months, start of the seventh month. August, Costa del Sol)

Zack got his hair cut the next morning. A physical reminder that it was time to move on. Time to get to work. He looked strange in the mirror, unrecognizable. He rubbed at the back of his neck, feeling strangely weightless.

Cloud, long done with his own trim, put a hand on his shoulder. “Looks good.”

“Of course it does,” Zack scoffed. Cloud’s fingers squeezed gently, and despite his brash words, Zack was grateful for the reassurance.

They left the barber’s and rode up into the rolling hills, away from potential listening ears. They traveled past scrubland, cacti, and exposed boulders of decomposing granite, while yellow- and brown-flecked butterflies fluttered up around them and orange hares with black tipped ears dashed away between the brush. As they climbed, the coastal chaparral gave way to sparse woods of oak and pine. They found a clearing near the crest of a hill, overlooking the city below and the glimmering sea. Zack slid off his chocobo first, then helped Denzel down from where he rode in front of Cloud. 

There was a pile of wind-softened boulders the size of a small house close at hand, and Denzel went climbing up it at once. “Don’t go too far,” Zack cautioned, grinning. Kid might still have the Enemy Away materia, but they’d be better off not pushing their luck.

Denzel scrambled up another few feet. “I’m going to be like Yuffie and see If I can find any materia.”

“ _Please_ don’t be like Yuffie.” The headaches that girl had given him. He’d been flabbergasted to learn the little scamp he’d met in Wutai all those years ago had been the country's princess, and that she’d become one of Cloud’s friends.

Denzel laughed and pulled himself higher. Zack watched him vanish over the summit, but he could still hear his sneakers scuffing over the rocks on the other side. The chocobos, untacked, walked past to forage among the oaks, and Cloud came to stand beside him. Zack blew out a whooshing breath. “Okay, so where do we start on Operation: Save The World, Get The Happy Ending?”

“We’re not calling it that.”

“Why not?”

“Because if things end, it means we lost.”

“We are not starting this talk in a negative mood. Hm. If you don’t like endings, how about Operation: Secure a Happy Future.”

Cloud’s eyes rolled. “Better.”

Zack ruffled his hair, and Cloud batted him away, smiling. “Get serious.”

“Alright, since we got the important part out of the way…” Cloud’s finger jabbed him in the side.

“Ouch! Okay. What happens next. From what I remember, Shinra’s at war right now. Next, uh, August, I think… Genesis gets hurt in a training accident. The injury doesn’t heal, he gets pissed at the company, and he, Hollander, and Lazard come up with a plan to… uh, I’m not quite sure. Get back at Shinra, overthrow it, tear it down, take over, something.”

He rubbed the back of his neck. Whatever their plan had been, he’d never understood it. Wasn’t even sure _they_ knew what they’d been trying to do. “Anyway, they put the plan into motion in October with a mass desertion from the military. SOLDIERs and troopers. It was supposed to be the last mission of the war, but instead the whole force went _poof_ into thin air.”

“Sounds like a group we could ally with.”

“No!” Zack waved his hands in a definite _no_ motion. “You don’t remember what happened?”

Cloud shifted uncomfortably. “Listen. My brain’s been scrambled by mako and Sephiroth. If I’m missing something, just tell me.”

“Oh. Right.” Cloud had explained his memory problems, but because he had all his future knowledge, it didn’t really come up much. Usually, he was better informed than Zack was. 

“Okay. It’s not the desertion that’s the bad thing.” _Wow_ , had he ever come a long way from the naive sixteen-year-old storming Fort Tamblin to think that. “It’s what Genesis and Hollander did to the guys who went with them. See, Genesis and Angeal are dying from something called degradation, it’s got to do with how mako and J-cells interact with their bodies. With Hollander’s help, Genesis turns all the men and women who trusted him into Genesis clones. They all get degradation from him, and Hollander experiments on them, looking for a cure.”

Now that he’d survived his own time in a Shinra lab, it was stomach-churning to think about what the clones might’ve suffered at Hollander’s hands. All the times Zack had cut them down before, and he’d never thought about it, never extended them that empathy.

“Genesis was flamboyant and charismatic. I can see him persuading a few to undergo the process, but most of them? Genesis betrayed them. If he gave a rat’s ass about them, he would’ve used monsters, like Angeal did.” It was a small and bitter consolation to Zack, that Angeal’s honor had twisted under the weight of his illness, but hadn’t broken.

It was still a den of monsters making monsters. Genesis hadn’t seen any of them as human, and Angeal had been slipping. 

“So…” He sighed heavily and leaned back against a boulder. Cloud leaned next to him. Their shoulders touched. “I guess what I’m getting at is, I want to find a cure for degradation. I want to save Angeal.” His mouth twisted wryly. “And I want to cure Genesis, too. If he doesn’t get sick, those other SOLDERs won’t die. And.. with what you told me about Hojo and Sephiroth, it makes me wonder what Hollander told Genesis and Angeal. Degradation’s mental, not only physical. If they were having trouble staying rational -” Angeal had told him so, in not quite so many words, “- it would’ve been easy for him to push them a little. Play them, set them up as little tools to enact his vendetta.”

Hollander had always seemed crude to Zack, and not that bright. But he’d run his experiment successfully for years, and company gossip had always put him as Hojo’s rival; he couldn’t be a complete dunce. And Lazard… Lazard had been a lot of things, but he wasn’t cruel. Had he known the full extent of what Hollander’s plans had been? 

“There’s one thing about Genesis I can relate to. You too, probably. He just wanted his hero to recognize him. To respect him and treat him as an equal.” Zack had got his heroes’ recognition in the worst way, with Angeal, and then in a different way, with Sephiroth. Angeal had made him kill him, and his burgeoning friendship with Seph had been broken by Nibelheim.

Both were nothing, though, compared to what Cloud had gone through. “You… Your hero’s pedestal got pretty well trashed. Sephiroth put you through hell.”

Cloud looked somber, but leaned more of his weight into Zack. “Well, the other one never let me down. I got you.”

Zack processed. “Me? Spike! I’m your hero?” Something warm swelled in his chest, huge and light.

Cloud looked away, a light dusting of red across his face. “Duh.”

Grinning like a dope, Zack wrapped him up in a big hug, planting a kiss on his cheek. Cloud allowed it for a few seconds, leaning into it, then pushed him off. “Focus, Zack.”

He backed off, still high after the confession. Hearing Cloud’s future stories, he’d thought Cloud had no heroes left, unless you counted his obvious affection for his friends. It was a huge rush to hear the word ‘hero’ applied to himself, and from the person he loved most. “Right, right. Back to securing the future. So, that’s what’s up with Angeal and Genesis.” 

Next was… Man, talk about a mood killer. Cloud was looking at him with a crooked smile, and he wanted to keep it there, but this was something they needed to talk about.

“Having said that, there’s this thing I know you’re not interested in, but hear me out. I want to save Sephiroth too.” Like he’d predicted, Cloud’s face closed off. His lips went down and his eyes narrowed into a glare.

He held his hands up for Cloud to wait and give him a moment to explain himself. “I’m not asking you to forgive him! But the Sephiroth in this time, right now, is not that guy. He doesn’t have that homocidal god-complex. He’s…” He almost said ‘a normal person’, but that was blatantly untrue. “He’s somebody I kinda made friends with, you know? And back in Nibleheim, when JENOVA got inside my head, you already warned me to watch out for her. I _knew,_ walking in there, what I was getting into. Sephiroth didn’t. It’s like with Genesis. How many of their actions were their own and how many were influenced by others? I don’t want to condemn them. Neither of them have done anything horrible yet. And If we change things, or we’re the ones influencing them, maybe they never will.”

Cloud crossed his arms and leaned back, assessing. Slowly, he nodded, though the frown stayed on his face. “I can see where you’re coming from. At the end of Advent, I started to pity him, what he’d become… But.” He ran an agitated hand through his hair. “I’d still rather kill him. I don’t want to take the risk, Zack. You say they were influenced? Well look at what JENOVA offered us. Me, power to protect the planet. You, to become a hero for it. Sephiroth wanted to destroy. That’s who he is, fundamentally. And if Genesis was okay with betraying people who trusted him, even with an outside force influencing him, it was still a decision he made. Somewhere in his personality, he thinks betrayal is okay if it serves his needs.”

“That’s not fair. Didn’t you convince Reeve to betray Shinra?”

“Don’t compare that to this,” Cloud said, with real heat. “Reeve knew Shinra was corrupt and when he got the opportunity, he switched sides! He worked to save the world, to make things better. He made a choice to help people, not hurt them.”

“But what, SOLDIERs don’t get to change?” He couldn’t keep the irritation out of his own voice in return, even though he didn’t want to ruffle Cloud further.

“They don’t get to hurt and betray the people they’re responsible for and then expect forgiveness without earning it!”

“But they _haven’t done_ anything yet!”

Mere minutes before, they’d been leaning comfortably against each other. Now they’d pulled apart, glowering across a distance that was greater mentally than physically. Zack had the feeling they were having separate conversations, but he couldn’t quite get himself across the gap to figure out where the disconnect lay. He looked away instead, rolled his shoulders and forced himself to relax.

“Just give them a chance. If you don’t see anything redeemable in them… fine. I’ll help you take them out. But please, keep an open mind.”

Cloud stood rigid for a long minutes. Finally, “Fine. One chance.”

Zack sagged with relief. “Thank you.”

Wind rustled through the branches above them and an oak leaf fell into Cloud’s hair. They both reached to remove it, and their hands met. Slowly, Zack slid his hand down, feeling the tension in Cloud. He rested his hand on the spot where neck and shoulder met and rubbed gently through the knit fabric. Cloud relaxed into it, then wrapped his arms loosely around Zack’s middle. His head drooped forward until it rested against Zack’s chest. “I hate fighting with you,” he mumbled.

“Same.”

They stayed like that for a little bit, until they heard the noise of small sneakers rustling through leaves. Cloud pulled back. Zack kept an arm looped over his shoulders.

Denzel appeared through the trees and stopped yards away. “I heard shouting. You guys okay?”

“Nah, we’re fine. Find anything interesting?”

“A squirrel nest.”

“Is everything okay?” Cloud inquired.

Denzel looked sheepish. “I forgot to take water with me.”

“That’s not good. It’s hot out today. You gotta stay hydrated.” Zack walked over to their saddles, grabbed one of their canteens, and tossed it to Denzel. He and Cloud had given the kid a lecture about it before, while they were in the Corel desert.

Denzel took a long drink and sighed. “Thanks. So, have you guys figured anything out?”

He shared a look with Cloud. “Well… we’ve got a starting point? We still need to figure out how to approach them. And cure degradation. I have an idea about it, but I’m not sure if it’ll work, or if we need to meet special requirements.”

Cloud cocked his head, dubious. “Requirements?”

“Degradation isn’t something a cure spell or a potion can heal. There was this…” Zack waved his hands illustratively, “ _huge_ materia in the Banora underground, stuck in a statue of the goddess. It worked when I fought Genesis there, but there was a lot of stuff going on, and I’m not sure if it was the materia or some sort of mystic thing that cured him. I mean, he died anyway, but something fixed the degradation.”

Cloud stiffened while Denzel leaned forward, curious. “A mystic power cured it?”

“Could’ve been.”

“Aerith’s spring,” Cloud murmured. Denzel nodded vigorously, his face lighting up.

“Aerith’s what, now?”

“Those little vials Cloud’s been carrying! They cured geostigma when nothing else could,” Denzel answered.

Cloud reached down and patted the satchel he habitually carried, eyes wide and wondering. “If Degradation is caused by JENOVA’s cells, then it should work.”

“You… You have the cure with you!” A grin spread across Zack’s face. His hands, restless and excited, grabbed his head, feeling like his mind was about to blow, then clamped onto Cloud’s shoulders. “So you have an entire bag full of something that can cure JENOVA-related illness?!”

Cloud nodded.

“What were you doing with it?!”

“I took it on deliveries and handed it out to anybody who needed it.”

He could save Angeal. For six months, he’d been walking around right next to the answer. Even with his heart pounding excitedly in his ears, he wondered, and not for the first time, how Cloud had come back in time. What might’ve sent him, and why. Maybe these little vials were the answer. “Alright. Alright.” He put a hand on his chest, tried to calm his racing pulse. “Cool. We have a cure. How do we give it to them?”

“You know them better than I do,” shrugged Cloud. 

He scratched the back of his head. “Yeah. Hm. I don’t exactly see them drinking something some rando sent to them. And we should have a backup, just in case. The water might only work on geostigma.”

Cloud opened the satchel and drew out a finger-sized glass tube. Clear water moved inside it, sparkling faintly. He uncapped it and held it out for Zack to sniff, and it didn’t smell like water. Instead, there was a fresh scent like unfurling leaves and approaching rain, layered with the sweetness of lilies. “Great Gospel can cure a lot of things. It was Aerith’s limit break. She was able to cast it from the lifestream, and made the spring.”

Zack smiled. “How ‘bout that? I got a limit break from her, Healing Wind, but this seems like it’s even better.” A little pang of grief for what-had-been tightened his smile. “She’s amazing. I hope she gets her chance to explore the world in this time, too.”

“Under better circumstances.” Cloud recapped the vial and put it away.

Zack laughed, rolling his eyes. “That’s a given. Still, I guess I’m just paranoid about degradation. We’ve got Aerith’s water, and the goddess materia as a backup… You know, Genesis and Hollander thought S-cells might help, but they only made it worse. Dude ate my hair.”

“What?” Denzel’s nose wrinkled in disgust. Cloud looked equally weirded out.

“Yeah. Cloud, you were having a pretty bad day, no wonder you don’t remember. They caught up with us and a clone ripped out and ate a piece of my hair. It didn’t go down well.” 

Denzel shuddered. “Gross.”

“It was! But anyway, for a plan C, I can’t think of anything. So with either of our two options, we’ve got to try talking to them.”

Cloud shifted, adjusting the swords on his back. “No.”

“Yes. Talk to them. Like I said, they’re not going to drink random vials, and I think’ll it be tough to meet them in Midgar. Too many eyes on them. Maybe we should try Wutai.” In the chaos of the war, and with Zack and Cloud’s skills, it’d possible to slip in and talk to them.

“Zack.” Cloud’s voice was low, steady, hard. “If I go to Wutai, I’m going to fight for Wutai.”

It was Zack’s turn to frown. “If we fight for Wutai, we’ll be fighting against SOLDIER, they won’t trust us. And you wanted to talk to Reeve, right? He won’t trust us either.”

Cloud shook his head. “If we go, I’m not going to be able to keep ignoring what Shinra’s doing there. I’m not interested in letting them rule the planet. And until Shinra gets a shake-up or falls, it won’t matter if I can get in contact with Reeve or not. He’s not going to have enough power to turn the company away from mako energy.”

“But if Shinra collapses, what’s the fallout? I mean, you said things were bad after Meteor. The world needs electricity, Cloud, which means we need the reactors, and Shinra, at least for now.” Plumbing and sanitation, transportation, hospitals, food storage. There wasn’t enough canned food in the world to supply Midgar for more than a week. “I know you want to get rid of them, but that’ll take a long time. We can work on it, but it’s gotta be a long-term thing.”

Defensive, Cloud crossed his arms. “It wasn’t pretty, surviving without them, but we managed. I’m only thinking of blowing up the reactors as a last resort.” He said it like he was making some sort of concession.

“Blow up!?” He threw his hands in the air. “Gaia, Cloud, do you _want_ Shinra after us again?!”

“No! But I can’t let them do what they want. I’ve fought them before.”

“Yeah, so have I! And it fucking sucked!” And I died. “I told you, I’m friends with most of SOLDIER and a lot of the troopers, and I don’t want to go out of my way to fight them.”

“Then why don’t you go back and join them,” Cloud snapped.

Zack flinched.

Cloud immediately ducked his head. “… Sorry. I just…” He took a deep breath. “I don’t know what to do, Zack.”

“Nah, it’s cool…” They were both stressed over this. Zack turned away, running a hand through his hair, startled all over again by its shortness. His eyes skittered over the scenery, not settling anywhere, until he finally managed to turn back to Cloud.

He was glaring at the ground, tension locked into every limb. Even though he regretted what he’d said, he clearly didn’t intend to back down on his major points. Denzel stood wide-eyed between them, unsure and nervous. Even the chocobos had raised their heads to check what their owners were doing.

Damn it, how did he fix this? He didn’t want to fight SOLDIER. He wanted to cure Angeal and Genesis, and save Sephiroth from his destructive future. Cloud wanted to save the planet, get rid of mako energy, and disrupt Shinra’s monopoly. How did he make their conflicting wishes work?

An idea suddenly clicked into place for him. “Hey… Hang on, I think you might be onto something with that whole ‘joining them’ thing.”

Cloud’s head snapped up. “I’m not joining Shinra, Zack.”

“No, no, I get that, I’m not interested in going back either. But, remember how I said Genesis is going to cause a mass desertion? What if we got them to join us instead?”

Cloud’s eyes widened. “I… why….how?”

“Like you said, Shinra needs a shake up. I agree with you! This could help. I’m not sure how to pull it off yet, but we can work on it as we head to Wutai.” It wasn’t a plan yet, just an idea, but he was confident they could pull this off.


	9. All is fair in love and war

(In the past for ten months, November, Wutai)

When they first got to Wutai, it was a breathtaking autumn. The forests were filled with beeches, birches, maples, chestnuts, and ginkgos turning bright red, orange and yellow. The riot of mixed colors, dotted with the dark shades of evergreens, had made their dangerous game of cat and mouse with Shinra easy. Now, as the deciduous trees lost their leaves, hiding was getting more difficult.

Genesis and Sephiroth were stationed here, but the plan hinged on talking to Angeal, and he was still in Midgar. They were trying to lure him over by using guerrilla tactics behind Shinra’s lines: disrupting their supply chain by damaging roads, bridges, vehicles, landing fields, and docks, or fouling up communications by knocking out towers and cutting lines. More than one outpost and garrison had woken in the night to stumble out of their bunks with eyes and noses streaming from the stink bombs rolled under their tent flaps or thrown through a window, courtesy of Zack. Once the people were out, the place would go up in flames or, if geography allowed, be crushed by a landslide courtesy of Cloud, while the former occupants looked on in despair. 

They also collected the less deadly wildlife of the island and released it into barracks and camps, keeping the inhabitants awake and on edge. So there were giant cicadas shrilling all night, angry swarms of hornets buzzing around, and large non-venomous spiders nesting in surprising places. Rats and raccoon dogs kept ‘finding’ their way into food storage, no matter how tightly sealed and guarded. Lesser adamantaimai from rivers and ponds wandered around the camps, no matter how far from the water they were established. The turtles weighed thirty to fifty pounds, almost nothing when compared to their giant cousins, but they were aggressive, with bone-snapping jaw strength. They made good use of Cloud’s Enemy Skill materia, especially the Frog Song spell. And of course, when they came across any of Scarlet’s weapons, they took them out with prejudice. 

In the month and a half since they’d begun their operation, Shinra hadn’t gained any significant ground in its war. The company’s attention was forcibly split between keeping Wutai’s remaining army pinned in the north and hunting the saboteurs, whereas Zack and Cloud could strike basically wherever they liked. As enhanced as they were, and carrying little weight, they could cover a lot of ground in a single night. It kept Shinra guessing how many saboteurs were after them, and whether specific incidences of bad luck were sabotage or just chance. Especially when their best operative couldn’t get anything like close to catching them. 

Cloud had an uncanny knack for knowing Sephiroth’s location, and it kept them on the move, well out ahead of him. Zack had S-Cells too, and aside from the incident with JENOVA, they’d never bothered him before coming to Wutai. Unlike Cloud, though, who could even pick up fuzzy hints of what Sephiroth was doing and where he was headed next, all Zack got was a kind of prickle in his head, an odd buzzing that sent shivers and goosebumps down his arms. He knew when Sephiroth was close, but not where, or in what direction.

“Well,” Cloud said dryly once, “it must be as bad for him, or worse.”

They were crossing a river, their swords balanced on their shoulders to keep them out of the tannin-stained water, and Zack looked at him with surprise. “You mean he gets it too?”

Cloud’s mouth thinned with displeasure. “Yeah. ‘Fraid so.”

“Yikes. At least I know what’s causing it.”

Roughly a week later, they were beating feet in silence after a midnight raid cutting fuel lines at a small Shinra airbase carved out of the forest. Zack had actually seen Genesis there, or at least the hem of his flapping scarlet coat, and they could both feel the itching, magnetic draw of Sephiroth approaching at helicopter speed. They scaled a short cliff, on their way back to the mountainside cave they’d stashed Denzel and an Enemy Away materia in. Cloud caught Zack’s gloved hand at the top and helped him get over, but didn’t let go. He stared at their joined hands with a wierd, thoughtful expression, like someone probing a loose tooth.

“What’s up?”

“I only noticed tonight… I can feel where you are too.”

“Huh?”

Cloud let go and kept heading uphill. “The same way I can sense Sephiroth, but not as strong. I knew where you were on the airfield tonight.”

“Huh. Weird.” Zack closed his eyes, tried to feel outwards… All he got was the prickling knowledge that Sephiroth was roughly three dozen miles somewhere to the southwest of them. “Nope. Nothing.”

He jogged until he caught up with Cloud. “So, like, is it getting stronger, or something? It’s not like I picked up more S-cells all of a sudden.”

Cloud was quiet as they picked their way around a dense thicket of thorn bushes, but on the far side, he said, “I think it’s always been there. I just noticed tonight because Sephiroth was nearby, so I was paying close attention. It’s not something sinister, I think.”

Zack laughed and looped an arm around his shoulders. “Or any _more_ sinister, huh?” The connection came through Sephiroth, and out of their time in Hojo’s lab, but all the same, knowing he shared some ‘mystical’ bond with Cloud… That was kinda cool.

Two weeks after that, Zack arrived at the abandoned shrine they were staying in with a grin on his face and a bounce in his step, having given Shinra the slip yet again. Throwing the carved wooden doors open, he announced, “All hail the pranking saboteur, for I have brought good news!”

Denzel was lying on the floor, on his stomach with his feet in the air, and didn’t look up from a stolen notebook and box of crayons. “Welcome back.” 

Aside from their camping gear with the tent still bagged, there was no furniture in the big room, or in the cramped, ascetic quarters for a priest or monk at the rear of the building. Empty niches, hack marks, and conspicuously light patches of wood showed where statues, carvings, and hangings had once decorated the temple. Either its devotees had taken them with them when they evacuated, or Shinra forces had looted the place. Or possibly both. 

Their blankets were heaped in the corner, and Cloud stood from them, rubbing grit from his eyes. “My turn to head out?”

Zack pouted. “Aww, c’mon, can’t one of you act like you’re excited to hear what I have to say?”

Cloud, loading his pockets with gear, frowned at him. “Yesterday, your announcement was about how you got hold of a radio code book and serenaded the army at two a.m. with raunchy drinking songs, following them from encrypted channel to encrypted channel until they were forced to go to radio silence.” 

“Yep.” Zack grinned at the memory. “And because of that, you were able to ambush that convoy without them calling on any backup.”

Denzel giggled, and Cloud shook his head, but smiled. “Fine. What’s your good news?”

“Some SOLDIER reinforcements are on their way over from Midgar.”

“In our position, I wouldn’t consider that good.”

“I know, right? But!” The news was like a song inside him. He flung his arms out wide. “Angeal’s with them! Since Genesis and Sephiroth aren’t having any luck catching us, in comes Angeal. They’ve guessed we’re rogue SOLIDERs, so they’re sending the guy most SOLDIERs know, respect, and’ll talk to about their troubles.”

Cloud’s eyes widened in disbelief. “They’re sending Angeal to _talk_ to us?”

His grin stretched. “Isn’t it great! What we wanted is exactly what they’re doing!”

That blonde head of hair swished as Cloud tried to make sense of it all. “Why?”

He shrugged and plopped down, stretching his legs out and laying the Buster Sword down alongside. “I wasn’t able to get the whole conversation, but basically, they’ve figured out we’re enhanced, so we must be SOLDIERs. Since we haven’t caused any casualties, just been a major pain, we can be reasoned with, maybe brought back in.”

Both of the others snorted. Cloud finished loading his pockets, tossed a polishing kit to Zack, then untied three dried persimmons from a string of them they had hanging from a rafter. “Shinra wouldn’t let a pair of traitors back in.” He bit into one of the orange fruit, set one on the floor by Zack, and gave the last to Denzel.

Zack shrugged, opening the kit and pouring a few dribbles of oil onto a soft cloth. “Oh, I’m pretty sure they would. And then they’d send out a memo saying we were killed by a Wutai sneak attack.” He thought back to the terse personnel update emails on his PHS. “Actually, they wouldn’t bother with even that much of a lie. It’d just be K.I.A.”

“And unofficially, we’d be spending our time with Hojo.”

Zack’s hands shivered, leaving a wobbly streak of oil down the gleaming blade of the Buster. “Quick way to get to him and kill him.”

Cloud took a vicious bite out of his persimmon. “I’ll pass on going anywhere near the labs, thanks.”

“Yeah. Thanks, but no thanks.” He wiped the oil away. Under it, his eyes gleamed steel-blue in his reflected face. “Still, them thinking we’re rogue SOLDIERs is working in our favor.”

“The moment Angeal sees us, he’ll know we’re not.”

“And that’s why we gotta figure out how to get Angeal alone.” And he truly did mean _alone_. Cloud’s resentment for Shinra and SOLDIER would bleed into any conversation, making anyone they talked to less likely to believe they had SOLDIER’s best interest in mind. No, he was gonna have to do this on his own.

Cloud wasn’t going to like that. Best not tell him, and seek forgiveness after.

While Cloud was out, Zack made dinner, told Denzel a bedtime story, slept, and brainstormed. He had an idea, but he felt bad about using it. His birthday had been back in March. Twenty-four. A birthday he’d never reached in the other timeline. They’d gone out and gotten a drink. Not a big celebration, but his first in four years. Cloud had turned twenty-five on their way to Wutai. They hadn’t done anything for it because Cloud hadn’t wanted to make a big deal over it. Denzel’s birthday was coming up quick, and ten was a important birthday, entering the double digits. It shouldn’t be spent hiding in an abandoned shrine. Or, at least, not _only_ hiding in an abandoned shrine.

When he heard footsteps on the steep steps outside, he slipped outside to see Cloud trudging wearily home. Zack met him with a hug at the top of the steps, and then sat on the deck that wrapped around the shrine building to hear his report. The deck railings had broken off, leaving a clear and unimpeded view of the sun rising, illuminating the stark woodlands in the valley below and gleaming on the slight dusting of snow on the peaks above them. They sat shoulder-to-shoulder, hip-to-hip, sharing warmth.

Cloud had spent his night profitably. He’d knocked down an under-repair radio tower - Zack had knocked it over last time - and turned the repair crew and guards to frogs. He’d caused a landslide two valleys over, destroying the road, and destroyed a half-dozen of Scarlet’s sweepers.

“Good work,” Zack complimented. “Listen, Denzel’s birthday’s right on top of us. I want it to be special. I was thinking that, these next few days, after I’ve played with Shinra for a bit, I’ll scrounge around and see if I could find some party gear or presents. It’ll probably take a few days to find anything decent, so don’t worry if I come back late each day.” His heart beat faster as he spoke the lie - no, well, not a _lie_ , he was gonna do as he said. But this way, when Angeal arrived, Cloud wouldn’t worry if Zack wasn’t back in the usual loose timeframe of when they changed shifts.

Cloud nodded, and the warmth in his smile kind of broke Zack’s heart. “Okay. I’ve been thinking it’s about time to move camp. There’s an abandoned house about eight miles that way.” He pointed towards a small valley between sloping foothills. “Why not stash whatever you find there, and we’ll move on his birthday?”

“Sounds like a plan.” He leaned over and kissed Cloud on the forehead. “I’m gonna head for those docks they’re rebuilding. See if I can’t get any more information on when Angeal’s supposed to arrive.”

“Don’t get yourself into extra trouble.”

He put a shocked hand to his chest, pretending to be offended. “Me? Get into _trouble_? Never.” This time, he gave him a chaste kiss on the lips. “I promise to stay safe.”

Two days later, a pair of tiltrotor planes arrived at the battered southern base camp. From one of the nearby hills, using a pair of stolen binoculars, Zack watched the new personnel disembark. Troopers in their blue uniforms and third-eye helmets, SOLDIER 3rds and 2nds in their blue and purple fatigues, and one figure in black.

The binoculars grew blurry, and Zack had to wipe his eyes before looking again. Angeal, his face unlined by worry and pain, his hair gleaming black instead of dull chalky grey, his shoulders straight and proud instead of bowed in defeat. Zack’s throat tightened, and he blinked too much. He’d grieved Angeal, and resented him, and dreamed about him. After his encounter with JENOVA, hearing her voice, he’d forgiven him, too. Finally, in a way, he’d understood Angeal’s fear of his own actions, of what he might become.

He still wished though, with all his heart, that Angeal hadn’t made him do the deed, putting him down. Hadn’t made Zack live on, bearing the guilt of it.

Those three troopers, at the end, the glowing red lights on their helmets blearing as the rain came down, as they advanced through the heaps of corpses, as they shot him again and again… Zack hadn’t known them. He was glad they’d been strangers.

They probably had thought of him as a monster. He’d killed so many of their buddies, after all. Trying to save himself and Cloud, he’d made it personal for them. 

The thing was, he’d do it again if he had to. He would go through all of Shinra for his, Cloud’s, and Denzel’s freedom. But he didn’t want to. That’s why, when he looked at Angeal, he knew he had to do this right. He had to draw a convincing dividing line between SOLDIER and Shinra.

Zack spent the next hour or so crouched, observing what he could. The wintry sun went sliding down in the sky. In that time, Genesis and Sephiroth had turned up to greet the other 1st class and show him around the base. Zack snickered when he saw Genesis gesturing to some of the damage he and Cloud had caused. Now, if only Angeal would leave the base.

It was only a matter of time, since Angeal’s assignment was to talk to them, but Zack wanted the meeting under his own design. If he left the circumstances to Shinra, it’d be a set up. And the more time he gave them, the worse the trap.

He walked softly through greying gullies, keeping the SOLDIERs in sight. As he stepped over a drift of moldering leaves, he saw Sephiroth’s head snap toward the hills. Toward him. He froze. He’d thought he was out of hearing range. Or maybe it was the damn S-cells?

Sephiroth scanned the hillside before turning back to his companions. After a brief conversation, he and Genesis walked away, and Angeal headed out of camp, on a direct line toward the hill Zack was watching from. Yup, Sehpiroth had definitely noticed him. Well, shit. This was why they _avoided_ Sephiroth. S-cells told them where he was, and they didn’t go near him. An easy-to-follow protocol that he’d screwed up.

Should he leave and come back later? Cloud might find out Angeal was here and Zack’s window to meet him alone would vanish. Maybe he could lure Angeal a long way out, far enough he wouldn’t have to worry about the army, just SOLDIER.

Hoo boy, these were not good options.

He walked on, not bothering to cover his tracks. He didn’t move fast and Angeal’s pursuit stayed the same speed. Honestly, it was like the two of them were taking a casual autumn stroll a couple hundred yards apart. 

Zack stopped atop a hill about two miles from the Shinra base. There was a burnt-out farm at the foot of it, the blackened beams of a house and two outbuildings, and most of the hillside was dried-out rice terraces. He had a good view of the nearby river and the surrounding woods. Fragments of bamboo pipes ran up from the river, leading to a big wooden contraption that Zack leaned against. Something used for irrigation, maybe. For him, it could work as cover.

He could still feel the itchy sensation of Sephiroth’s nearness, but he heard only one person moving through the forest. If Sephiroth was on his way with reinforcements, they weren’t close. The footsteps stopped for a few minutes at the edge of the treeline, then Angeal stepped out. He cut across the terraces and joined Zack on the crest. The stars were coming out overhead, peeping through strips of ragged cloud.

“Hey Angeal, long time no see.”

There were about two hundred guys in SOLDIER, and he could tell by the slight furrow of his brows that his old mentor was trying to place him.

Zack huffed a laugh. “Don’t worry if you don’t recognize me. I’ve changed a lot since we last met.” He was taller, older, battle-scarred, wore his hair differently.

Angeal was different too. It wasn’t just that he was healthy, with no sign of degradation. It was the same feeling as when Zack had visited home. Angeal seemed smaller, somehow. Zack was older than him. The realization hit hard. 

For his part, Angeal stood assessing him, taking in the black clothes and combat boots, giant sword across his back, and glowing blue eyes. “I can see you’re SOLDIER, which means I’m responsible for you. Care to tell me what happened?” Sephiroth was the poster boy of the SOLDIER program, the apple of the corporate and public eyes, but Angeal was the heart, and he sounded genuinely warm and concerned.

“Oh boy, that’s… That’s a tough one.” Zack rubbed the back of his neck and took a deep breath. Telegraphing his movements so as not to provoke a fight, he unslung the Buster Sword from his back. Reverently, he held in front of his face.

“Embrace your dreams and protect your honor as SOLDIER.” He flipped the Buster, planted it heavily in the earth. _See? No threat._

Angeal was staring at the sword with the whites of his eyes showing. Zack grinned ruefully. “You used to tell me that all the time. But I don’t think either of us really thought it through. What good are dreams if they hurt other people? What good’s our honor when we work for a company that doesn't have any? It’s a waste, Angeal.”

Poor Angeal, clearly rattled, rallied magnificently. “You’re right that Shinra is not always honorable. It’s impossible for any organization to reach its size with clean hands and a clear conscience. But Shinra provides services that no other company, nor even any governments, do. It raises families out of poverty.” His voice got deeper, more resonant. “And honor is independent of circumstances. It comes from inside; it’s the standard we hold ourselves to.” He paused and smiled wryly at Zack. “Stink bombs aren’t very honorable.”

“Maybe so.” Zack nodded. “But better than setting things on fire when everybody’s still inside, right, ‘geal?”

The nickname, so rarely used, made Angeal frown. “It’s notable, and it speaks well of you, that you’ve gone so far out of your way to avoid direct casualties. But you’re aware, of course, that we’re suffering an unusual rate of disciplinary actions and battlefield casualties? Hungry, sleep-deprived, and paranoid men fight poorly, and they fight among themselves, too.”

Zack’s stomach twisted. “Yeah, I know. I don’t love it. But you’ve backed off hard from engaging Wutai, so the _actual_ casualty rate is way, way down.” Angeal looked like he was about to say something, so Zack held up a hand to forestall him, blurting out, “Look, I’m not here to be a hero. I’m over that dream. I’ve seen the sacrifice needed to be that person, and I’m not after that.”

Angeal - eyes on the prize, still warm, still trying to approach him in the manner of a concerned and caring officer - asked, “What are you after? What’s your goal?”

“I could ask you the same. Shinra sent you to _talk_. Why? Why not try and fill me full of bullets and be done with it?”

“The company wants you back. There’s not so many SOLDIERs that we can afford to give you up without trying. The president’s willing to overlook the damage you’ve caused.”

Stress went burning through Zack’s body like being hit with a poison spell. “D’you really believe that, ‘geal? Shinra spends bodies more carelessly than it does gil, and it’s pretty casual about gil. Say you did get us back - then what? Can you see us landing anywhere but in the labs? See what ‘went wrong’ with us?”

Zack had only become a favorite for running missions for the Turks and the Science Department long after the mass desertion and Angeal’s disappearance. Angeal, standing so high in SOLDIER’s ranks, must’ve seen that darker side of Shinra already. Whether it was his honor or what, he didn’t bother to lie to Zack. He just shifted angles.

“That sword… Where’d you get it?” 

Zack lifted the Buster slightly. Not to threaten, just to show off. “Cloud got it infused with upgrade nodes, sub-cores, whatever they are, but I’m sure you recognize it. Even with all the extra wear and tear.”

“It’s… a convincing replica.”

“Yeah, it would be, if that’s what it was. But there’s only one true Buster… Well, two now. One’s just been through a little more.”

“What do you mean?” It’d been years since Zack had seen Angeal, and he’d never been able to read him the way he’d learned to read Cloud. But his mentor seemed to be trying to project calm over a fiery bed of curiosity, suspicion, even fear.

“What? Haven't you figured it out yet? Who I am?” 

He returned the sword to his back, clapped his hands in front of his face, and gave his best puppydog eyes. “Ple~ase?” he wheedled, before dropping into a series of squats. “Just you watch, I’ll make first in no time.”

Angeal stepped back, calm slipping out of his grasp. Zack popped back to standing. “It's me, Zack. I’m from the future.”

“Of all the possible drivel you could spout, you choose that!?” 

Shit. He’d been so preoccupied talking to Angeal he’d forgotten to keep an eye out for the other 1sts. Genesis stood about a hundred yards to his left, Sephiroth the same distance, but further behind, on his right. Belatedly, Zack realized that the goosebumps on his arms weren’t just because of the dropping evening temperature.

Genesis sneered. “Here, I thought we’d be listening to the damnable protests of a conscientious objector, not the ravings of a madman.”

Sephiroth regarded him closely. “Excess mako can cause mental instability, with a strong effect on memories. It’s likely this SOLDIER came into contact with a large quantity of it and now believes himself to be Zack Fair. He came to the conclusion that he must be from the future to rationalize his age and his sword,” he theorized.

With a huff, Zack answered. “I’m standing right here. If you’re going to psycho-analyze me, can you have the courtesy to do it behind my back?”

Sephiroth’s theory seemed to have caught on, though. After all, it was more plausible than the truth. 

Angeal took a careful step towards Zack, hands held out disarmingly. “Have you come into contact with any mako lately? It’s okay if you have. We’ll take you back to Midgar and the doctors will help you remember who you are.” 

Zack groaned. Yeah, he’d come into contact with the stuff, if you counted pickling in it on Hojo’s orders as contact. “I’m not suffering from mako addiction, or poisoning, or from altered memories. I really am Zack Fair, from Gongaga, and from the future. I’m not going to the labs.”

He’d rather die then end up back in Hojo’s hands. Or any other scientist’s, for that matter.

The SOLDIERs shared a sceptical look. Yeah, they didn’t believe him. This was why he’d only wanted to talk to Angeal. He could convince him, if he had time. He ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah, okay. I know it sounds farfetched, but you have to listen to me for a minute. If you think you’ve seen what Shinra’s capable of, you haven’t. This company’s secrets have got secrets. Some of ‘em are about you guys.”

He took a couple steps back, trying to get all three SOLDIERs in view but they moved with him. One stayed outside his field of vision at all times, and they moved steadily closer. Suddenly Zack felt hunted. Not good. He needed out now.

“But... you’re not gonna listen to me, are you?”

“We will. We just want to help. Let’s go back to base and it’ll all be okay.” Angeal tried to reassure him.

Zack slid his foot through the leaves, widening his stance. “No ‘geal, it really won’t be. I’m not just talking about the war. I’m talking about the whole planet, I’m talking massive, earth-shaking disasters on the way -”

He bolted.

His plan had been to get past Angeal, the slowest of the three, but Sephiroth intercepted. Zack pivoted and let momentum send him into a roll down the hill. After a yard, he sprang to his feet, swung the Buster off his back and caught Masumune’s incoming strike. 

Weird. The impact of it wasn’t as strong as he remembered. Maybe it was the extra mako, the age gap, or the fact that Sephiroth wasn’t trying to kill him. Whatever it was, he’d take it. With a grunt, he pushed back, but Sephiroth had the uphill advantage in this struggle. Changing tack, he released pressure.

A lesser fighter would have stumbled forward, switching their elevations. But Sephiroth was experienced. As soon as the pressure eased, he disengaged and swung at Zack’s side. Zack brought the Buster around one-handed in a quick parry. The swords clashed with a metallic screech. With a deft flip of the wrist, he forced both blades up and punched at his opponent’s face. 

Sephiroth jerked back and disentagled Masamune. There was a faint crease between his eyebrows, and his eyes were calculating. They traded a few more strikes and Sephiroth upped the speed and strength of each one. Testing.

Fine, if they wanted to test him, then he’d prove who he was. He’d felt the pressure growing for a while. Zack focused his thoughts on Angeal as his limit break’s power clicked into place. He felt the power surge, a halo of gold light surrounding him. _Show me your honor_.

Zack gave a feral grin and reslung the Buster. “I got it.” 

The limit increased his speed, and this time he caught Sephiroth square on the jaw. He landed seven hits before coming around from a different angle, and landing another seven. Of course, Sephiroth had seen this attack before from Angeal and he managed to dodge Zack’s final dive. He looked less calculating now. More surprised and wary.

Yeah, he’d got past Seph’s guard and used a close imitation of Angeal’s limit break to do it. If that didn’t prove he was more unusual than a plain mako-addled SOLDIER, he wasn’t sure what would. 

The fight had taken them down to the base of the hill. Sephiroth flicked his sword, a movement like a cat swishing its tail, as Angeal and Genesis came to flank him. They were standing on level ground now, and Zack did a double take as a surprising observation intruded. “Hey. Since when am I the tallest?”

They looked at him as though he’d grown a second head. Really, though, it was startling. It was only an inch or two difference, but Angeal and Sephiroth had always seemed larger than life to him.

Genesis raised Rapier and sent tongues of flame licking along the red blade. “He’s delusional. Really, Sephiroth. If you aren’t going to fight properly, allow me.”

“Wait, Genes-” Whatever, Angeal was going to say was cut off as Genesis lunged.

“Whoa!” Zack dodged the red blade only to find Masumune coming at him from the opposite direction. He dropped, rolled, and caught Angeal’s fist as he stood. 

“Sorry about this.” He tugged on his mentor’s arm, flipping him over his back and bodily throwing him into the others. Angeal collided into Genesis with a solid thud, knocking them both to the ground. Sephiroth dodged, then pressed in, sword cutting a deadly arc.

Zack parried the heavy strikes, his shoulders beginning to ache from the jarring rhythm. Despite the high stakes, he felt weirdly calm. When he looked at Sephiroth, he knew this wasn’t the madman he’d fought in the reactor. His green eyes were clear and determined, not wild and unhinged, and a bruise was forming on his jaw.

A flare of orange light caught Zack’s attention. He disengaged and leapt clear of the incoming fire spells. Genesis traded places with Sephiroth in a flurry of attacks. It was the same feeling with him. There was nothing manic to his face or movements. Determined, serious, aware he was facing a difficult opponent, but not desperate or unhinged.

Dodge. Block. Evade. Retaliate. Endurance was Zack’s specialty. He got knocked down and bounced back up, as many times as it took, but this fight was becoming a rythme he knew he couldn’t keep following. Between Sephiroth’s overpowering strikes and Genesis constantly trying to force an opening, he wearing down. At least they were trying to take him alive, which made the fight an improvement over his last knock-down, drag-out fight - the one where he’d died. Angeal stood back, watching and waiting.

That felt like old times, actually. Angeal had always taught like this, letting Zack fight his own battles, only stepping in if Zack was about to get seriously wrecked. Maybe that's why Zack was lulled into a false sense of security and left his back open to the man.

Sephiroth slid away, Genesis dashed in. Zack’s downward strike was a little too heavy, and embedded the ends of the Buster and the Rapier into the ground. Heaving the sword back out of the earth was an effort. As he managed it, he felt Angeal’s arms wrap around his middle, tackling him to the ground. They went down hard and Zack got a mouthful of dirt and leaves. He struggled, twisting and bucking, but his arms were firmly trapped. 

“Get off! You’re heavy,” he grunted, knowing full well that Angeal wasn’t going to listen.

“Well, _that_ was a delightful experience,” Genesis huffed, brushing hair out of his sweaty face. His shoulders were heaving, and even Sephiroth seemed to stagger with exhaustion as he approached. He removed a pair of SOLDIER strength handcuffs from his coat pocket while Angeal shifted to allow him access to Zack’s wrists. 

All the panic and desperation that had been missing from the fight suddenly hit Zack in a wave. “Let me go! I’m not -” He sucked in a shallow breath. Angeal’s arms were as inflexible as iron girders. “I’m not going back to the labs, I’m not… Shit!”

“Genesis!” Angeal barked. “Grab his legs!”

Hands clamped around his ankles. Sephiroth grabbed hold of one of his arms. He felt the metal touch his skin. 

_I’m sorry, Cloud._

Suddenly, Sephiroth wasn’t there any more. The closest trees exploded into splinters as he was thrown into them. Angeal jerked with surprise and released his grip, dodging backwards as the Fusion Sword whistled through the air where his head had just been. Genesis had already let go, cursing, prepping a spell that he never got to finish.

A powerful Thundaga cracked through the air. Even the shockwave sound of it was like a full body punch. The three SOLDIERs jerked and spasmed. 

Cloud was at his side. Zack wanted to reassure him he was okay, but Cloud wasn’t slowing down. In seconds, he had Zack hefted over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. He grabbed the Buster Sword and then they were gone. Winter trees whipped past them in a blur as Cloud left the scene at full speed.

“Cloud! It’s okay! I can run!” If Cloud heard him, he didn’t stop. 

They went several miles like that before Cloud apparently thought them far enough to be safe. Cloud set him down and began checking him over for injury. His blue eyes glowed bright with worry and he gasped down each breath.

“Hey, hey, it’s okay, I’m fine.” Zack grabbed hold of Cloud’s hands. “Hey, shhhh, it’s okay.”

Finally, Cloud looked up to meet his eyes. The worry in his face was starting to give way to relief. He reached up a shaking hand, pressing it to Zack’s cheek, over his scars. “I thought I was going to lose you,” he whispered.

Zack took his hand, kissing his palm, and wrapped his other arm around his waist. Like this, so close, he could feel how badly Cloud was trembling. How badly he’d feared losing him. “Thanks for the save.” 

The words sounded pathetic, compared to what Cloud had done for him. If they’d managed to get those restraints on him, he would have been done for. Labeled as mako-addicted and shipped off to the labs, to Hojo. He shuddered, holding Cloud tighter to him. He could have lost everything. 

The Science Department already had fingerprints, DNA samples, bloodwork from his past self. Hojo would have realized he was a time traveler, wouldn’t have told anyone, would have found a way to get hold of his younger self, would have done everything he could to get hold of Cloud. Both of them would have been trapped in the labs. Zack was overwhelmed as the reality of everything he’d barely avoided crashed around him. 

“Hey, Cloud?” he choked out. “Can I kiss you?”

The response was immediate. Cloud’s hand slid around, grabbed the hair at the base of his skull, pulling him down. Their lips crushed together, desperate with fear and relief. They kept meeting each other over and over until the adrenaline faded, the kisses gentling.

Zack could hear their heart rates even out and become a steady, even beat shared between them. “How,” he asked between kisses, “did you find me?” How’d you know I was in trouble?

Cloud gasped as Zack shifted to kiss at his neck, sending shivers and goosebumps down the sensitive skin. “I could - ah - sense that you and Sephiroth were together. Mmm, so - ah - I knew you were in trouble.”

“Mm. Thanks for saving me, but… we need to go back.”

Cloud immediately pushed him away. “What?!”

Zack had expected this response but frowned at the loss of contact. “We still need to talk to them.” He reached out but Cloud knocked his hand away.

“You’re going back!? They attacked you, they had you pinned! Why were you even there in the first place? I thought we agreed to stay away from them?”

“Yeah, we did,” Zack admitted, then continued in a rush, “but things have changed now that Angeal’s here. I went to talk to him, that’s the whole point of being here.”

Cloud looked betrayed. “I know that, but… we’re partners, Zack.” His voice dipped low, like he was unsure of that.

Cautiously, Zack reached out to set his hands on Cloud’s hips. He didn’t pull him close, just rested them there. “We are! And I’m thankful you found me and saved my stupid ass and I love you. You are my world, and I’m sorry I scared you. But I need to go back to talk to Angeal.”

“Why did you go without me in the first place?” Cloud laid his hands on Zack’s chest, running them up Zack’s sweater.

He sighed and hung his head. “I was worried how you’d react around Sephiroth.”

Those hands became fists, knotting up the fabric. “Because you don’t trust me to keep my cool.”

“Gee, I don’t know, maybe it’s because you want to kill him - _with good reason -_ , and I don’t want to put you in the position of dealing with your biggest personal nightmare.”

Cloud glared at him. “Too late for that. How do you think I felt when I saw you pinned beneath them? What if they took you away and handed you over to Hojo? What if I lost you again?” His voice broke and tears collected in the corners of his eyes.

Oh. Zack understood. It wasn’t only what he’d put himself through. Cloud had been just as terrified. He wrapped him in his arms and ran a soothing hand over his hair, down his tense neck. “Okay. Sorry. I was stupid. I wanted to protect you, but you don’t need my protection. Not in combat, and not in this. You’re my partner. I should have had more faith in you.”

“Damn right,” Cloud said. He rested his head on Zack’s shoulder. “Next time, we go together.”

“Yeah. Always.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Zack doesn't have an official birth date but online consensus is he’s an Aries, so late March, early April. Denzel also doesn’t have an official date but does have a general one, sometime between late November and early December.
> 
> Depending on what source you use , Zack is 6’2”, 6’3”, 6’4'' or 6’5”. So here I’m deciding the reason for the discrepancies is because Zack has kept growing and is now 6’5”. The other heights are as follows: Sephiroth 6’1”, Angeal 6’2”, young Zack 5’10”, Cloud 5'7”, Genesis 5’10” (I don’t know if this is his actual height or his height with bootheels).
> 
> Basic fighting style headcanon: Sephiroth - overpower, Genesis - force an opening, Angeal - wait for an opening, Zack - outlast, Cloud - no rules.


	10. Trouble shared is trouble halved

The Shinra base was only dimly lit as they snuck through barbed wire and past the guards. They’d knocked down some power lines in difficult mountain terrain a few nights ago. Looked like Shinra hadn’t repaired them yet. 

Cloud, aggravated, mumbled “This is stupider than the time I snuck into Shinra HQ.” Zack didn’t say anything, but couldn’t help thinking that striking at the company in the heart of its power, heading into a building Cloud had known contained Hojo, was a lot worse.

On the other hand, there hadn’t been three of the strongest SOLDIERs ever, on guard against them specifically, when AVALANCHE had done their infiltration. Zack had argued for this immediate return, that the three 1sts wouldn’t be expecting them to return after such a narrow escape, and that they were worn down while Cloud was still fresh. He’d won, though Cloud had insisted on not going in until he felt that Sephiroth was asleep. Which was why they were making their way through the scattered tents, temporary plywood buildings, and battered original structures of the occupied village at o’dark thirty. It was one of those original buildings, a two-story house surrounded by the bedraggled remnants of a nice garden, that Cloud stopped beside. 

“He’s in here,” Cloud hissed, his breath visible in the cold air.

Angeal would likely be bunked in the same building as Sephiroth, but they didn’t know for sure. Zack thought for a moment. “Alright, I’ve got an idea. Follow my lead.”

He stood from his crouch and headed for the door. Angeal had brought new SOLDIERs with him from Midgar. No way the guard had all the new faces memorized yet, and the dim light and the grainy quality of the trooper’s night vision lenses would hide the non-uniform nature of their clothes. “Hey, man. Angeal in?” 

The trooper, arms tightly folded against his chest and scarf pulled up high, made a very quick salute then returned to his huddled posture. “Yes, sir.”

“Cool, thanks.” He gave the trooper a heavy pat on the shoulder as he went in, Cloud following behind him.

Inside was warmer. There were still paintings hanging in the vestibule, and a vase and a small statue of Leviathan in a wall niche. A big plaque of the ever-present Shinra logo dominated one wall, though, and Zack could smell the surprisingly nostalgic scent of company-issued potions and sword polish. 

He led them up the wooden stairs. More senior officers likely slept on the second level. Thin wood and paper walls made it easy to hear who was in which room. He listened to the mix of gentle breathing and snores, trying to pick out Angeal among them.

However, he’d barely taken a step down the hall when Cloud grabbed his arm. “Sephiroth.”

A door slid open. Sephiroth, Masamune drawn, stepped into the hall. It wasn’t a great place for a fight, narrow, with thin walls that let through sound and, significantly, swords. He didn’t want the Buster getting hung up at a crucial moment. If things went right, though, it wouldn’t come to that.

Zack swallowed his nerves, plastered a large grin on his face, and waved. “Hey, Seph, I’m back. We didn’t get the chance to finish our conversation earlier… because you attacked me. But no hard feelings. I just want to finish what I had to say. If you still want to fight afterwards, well, I’m not looking forward to it, but -”

“By the Goddess,” a sleep-tousled Genesis appeared in another doorway, “he must be the world’s most perfect idiot.”

The others on the floor were waking up and shuffling to their doors. Zack kind of recognized some of them - they had mostly been part of Genesis’s mass desertion, so he’d never gotten to know them that well. Sephiroth was staring hard over Zack’s shoulder, and he took a protective step to the side, shielding Cloud from his gaze. (And, just a little bit, shielding Sephiroth from a potential explosion of violence from Cloud.)

Angeal stepped out of his own room, running a hand down his stubbled face. “I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but let's hear them out.” He met Zack’s eyes with a familiar expression of disbelief, resignation, and exasperated fondness. “Zack Fair is the only person I know of with the bravado, overconfidence, and lack of sense to pull something like this.”

He laughed at that. “You have no idea.”

Nobody else moved for a minute, then Sephiroth lowered Masamune so the tip rested on the ground. “What do you want?” 

Zack crossed his arms, leaning back, presenting calm. “Just to talk. What I was trying to tell you earlier is true. I’m from the future. I’m Zack Fair.” There was a startled murmur from the other SOLDIERs. “In my time, we were kinda friends. So I know some stuff about you guys, stuff that I couldn’t have picked up from the Shinra grapevine. I mean, we all know if there’s something every Shinra employee loves, it’s gossip.”

That got a snort from one of the SOLDIERs present. Zack grinned at him. He was about to bring up things he really shouldn’t know. Things that shouldn’t be said to a hall full of SOLDIERs, but asking for someplace private ran the risk of an interrogation room or a cell, somewhere harder to get out of than this building.

“Like, for example, Angeal, your dad drove the family into debt getting the Buster Sword for you, and that’s a big reason you mostly fight with your fists instead.” Angeal frowned, startled. He’d been Zack’s mentor for a year before he’d mentioned this story, it wasn’t something he spread around. “But he was bad with money your whole life. You grew up so hungry, you used to steal dumbapples back in Banora, but you never stole from the big tree in Genesis’s yard.” 

Zack turned to Genesis.

“Or Genesis. You won a bunch of agricultural fair awards as a kid, and you kept the trophies. I know what your real dream is. It’s actually quite simple. Honestly, I think it’s kinda sweet. You talk a big game about being a hero - relatable - but all you really want is for your hero to try one of the apples you grew. I don’t understand why you never just offered one, you had plenty of opportunities.”

Genesis drew himself up in outrage. “That is absolutely none of your business,” he snapped.

Zack couldn’t help it. He laughed and shook his head. Despite Angeal’s shock and Genesis’ affronted anger, he felt the tension in the room had dropped a little, replaced by curiosity and even amusement. Maybe it was a good thing the other SOLDIERs were here. 

Sephiroth hadn’t taken his eyes off them. “If you really are who and what you say you are, why are you here? And who is your companion?”

Zack straightened, his smile fading. He pulled the buster sword free. All the SOLDIERs went back to being tense, but all he did was hold it up in front of himself. “Hold onto your dreams. If you want to be a hero, you have to hold onto your dreams and your pride.”

He took a deep breath and returned the blade to its harness. Looking straight at Angeal, he said, “That’s what you told me when you gave me the Buster Sword. And that’s what I told Cloud.” He moved so everyone got their first good look at the man behind him, clapping him on the shoulder and bringing him forward. “When I passed the sword to him.” 

“There’s a hole in your story,” Genesis pointed out.

“Really. What?”

“Why you have the Buster Sword now, if you passed it on.”

Cloud spoke up. “I gave it back.”

“Yeah. Cloud’s from 010. I died in 07, but he grabbed me and brought me back with him before I punched my ticket. That’s how we know we can change the past.”

That sent a murmur through the assembled men. Angeal’s frown came back in full force. 

Genesis stepped forward. He was closest to them now. “Oh? And how did you travel back.” His eyes were hyper focused on Cloud.

Cloud stepped forward as well, answering the challenge. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not why we’re here.”

“Right.” Zack agreed quickly, trying to avoid a possible confrontation. “Some pretty bad shit is going to happen and we wanna stop it.”

Sephiroth raised an eyebrow. “And you think you’ll accomplish that by attacking Shinra’s army.” 

Zack wiggled his hand. “Ehh… We didn’t  _ attack _ you guys, per se.”

“You did plenty of damage, destroyed infrastructure, kept everyone hungry and tired.”

“We had to do  _ something _ severe enough to make HQ send Angeal over, as well as you guys, so we could talk to all three of you. Didn’t really want to talk in Midgar, in the company’s lair. And hey! The plan worked!”

This time, it was Angeal’s turn to sigh. “If you really are Zack, you have my PHS number. You could have set up a meeting that way. Didn’t you think to call?”

“The Turks monitor phone lines,” Cloud said bluntly. “We’re not here to fall back into company hands. We’re only here now because Zack wants to save you.”

“Oh? You don’t?” Genesis smiled. His voice was light but dripped with venom.

Cloud shrugged. “Saving you now will save me trouble later.”

“Thank you for your kind consideration,” Genesis stepped forward, about to enter Cloud’s personal space, but Angeal put a hand on his shoulder and drew him back.

“Trying to save us? From what, Zack?”

Zack opened his mouth, paused, started, “Uh, it’s kinda…” He looked around. “Look, you're not going to like what I have to say, you're not going to like people hearing it,” he gestured to the onlookers, “and also I’m not sure where to start.”

“The beginning is normally a good place.” 

“Yeah. The beginning.” Zack hung his head, taking a deep breath. He could do this. “I guess that starts with project G.” 

Cloud shook his head. “It starts farther back than that.”

* * *

Cloud began the story, all the way back in ancient history, with the Ancients, the Cetra, and the calamity that fell from the sky. When he said the name ‘JENOVA’, Sephiroth’s eyes sharpened in a way that made Cloud’s skin crawl, but the SOLDIER stayed quiet and listened. 

Genesis, on the other hand, interrupted to protest the idea of a virus infecting and potentially destroying a planet. Planets weren’t living organisms, they were orbs of rock orbiting suns. This forced Cloud on a detour to explain the lifestream, how all living things on the planet were connected, and how JENOVA interfered with that.

When he moved onto explaining the complicated and entangled experiments of Gast, Hojo, and Hollander, what had gone on behind the scenes of the SOLDIER program’s creation, all three of the top SOLDIERs looked shaken, though they tried to hide it. The onlookers weren’t bothering.

“Sirs?” one ventured. “Are you sure you want us to be here?”

Genesis started to say something, but Sephiroth raised a hand. “You can all hear through the walls, and it would look suspicious if you all left the building.” He gazed around levelly. “And you’re entitled to hear what these two have to say about SOLDIER’s secrets.” He gestured to Cloud. “Continue.”

It was… creepy, to see how normal Sephiroth acted, at this point in history. It set Cloud on edge, but Zack covered, stepping in to talk about Gillian and degradation. As he got to Angeal forcing him to kill him, Genesis interrupted again, sounding almost frantic. Cloud had the impression that hearing about Angeal’s death scared him far more than hearing about his own madness and what he’d done to the other men in this room.

“Your timing is convenient, isn’t it? We’re setting up the final push to the Wutaian capital when suddenly, you two appear. You cause us all sorts of problems, and now show up to tell us stories that might compromise our judgement, shake our loyalty. What proof can you offer us that anything you’re saying is true?”

“Lucrecia,” said Cloud. “Sephiroth’s mother.” He explained the messiness behind Sephiroth’s birth, the triangle of Hojo, Lucrecia, and Vincent, what had become of them. “You can find her, talk to her, if you want. The cave she’s sealed inside is in the Nibel mountains.”

“We’d have to leave Wutai to find her, then?” Sephiroth asked. “That’s not very convincing proof.”

“Ripped right from a fairy tale, one might say,” Genesis sneered.

Angeal looked at Zack, something almost pleading in his expression. “They’re right. We need something more solid.”

“More solid than we’ve already given you?” said Cloud. “At what point -”

Zack put a quelling hand on his arm. “Well, you haven’t heard the worst things yet. You haven’t heard what else degradation will make you do, - though I do wanna say, we think we’ve got a cure for that - or what happens with Seph. We haven’t even scratched the surface of Shinra’s shit.”

Sephiroth spoke. “What happens with me?”

“Uh….” Zack glanced at Cloud. “You cool talking about this, or do you want me to do the abridged version?”

Cloud glared past him, at Sephiroth, whose cat eyes met his coldly. No. That was his memory making them look like that. In the eyes of this Sephiroth, the need to appear calm and in command couldn’t quite hide the alarm he felt at this litany of horrors. “I’ll do it. First, I want to know. Have you been able to tell when Zack and I are nearby?”

The spark of alarm grew. “...Is that what that is?”

Cloud nodded. “S-cells. We were dragged into the same project you came out of.” Hating each word he spoke, he talked about Nibelheim, about Hojo’s labs, about escaping and going on the run. He told the story of Zack’s death, of joining AVALANCHE, of discovering the damage Shinra was doing to the planet, the lives they were ruining in their pursuit of mako and the Promised Land. He talked about the clones, he talked about Aerith. Around the time he got to the Northern Crater, his throat started hurting. He explained about Meteor, how narrowly the world had avoided destruction. By the time he got to Kadaj’s Reunion, he was going hoarse. But talking about it directly to the one responsible, seeing the blood drain from his face, seeing how his friends put steadying hands on his shoulders… it was like lancing a boil. There was a good pain to it. Like something was draining away, after a long time festering.

There was silence when he finished, for a long minute. Then one of the other SOLDIERs, a 2nd Class, spoke. “That was why you came back. Because nobody else could stop him.”

“Well, if you make the choice to believe us, he won’t have to be stopped this time,” said Zack. “Look, I know it's a doozy of a story. There’s a lot to unpack. I get it, believe me. But you’ve got to have seen enough of this company that some of this rings true to you, probably different parts of it to each of you.”

The SOLDIERs, who’d made themselves comfortable over the long telling by leaning against door frames or sitting cross legged in the hall, glanced among themselves. A towering, square-jawed 1st said, “I’ve done security details for the Science Department. What I heard tonight… It doesn’t surprise me. Answers some questions, actually.”

Another man, a 2nd with anchor tattoos on his bare arms, said quietly, “They’re not wrong about what’s happened, is happening, in Junon.”

And another, “Ran some missions for the Turks. Pretended I didn’t realize what kind of fucked-up shit -” He broke off, covering his mouth and looking away.

More and more of them spoke up, confirming in general and in detail the stories Cloud and Zack had told. Confirming things they hadn’t talked about, tragedies and horrors that predated them. It was strange. They’d come here to talk to and convince the three top SOLDIERs, but it was the ones below them who were doing the work.

At last, Sephiroth turned to them. He looked angry and dazed, perfectly human. “What are your goals, and what assistance do you need from SOLDIER?”

Outside the latticed windows, the sun came up.

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here are some scenes that ultimately did not make the finale cut for this chapter;
> 
> (1)  
>  “Why are you being so difficult!? You’re the one who caused a mass desertion last time. I thought you would be the easiest to convince.” (Z)
> 
> Genesis sniffs “Oh? Am I to be a puppet to your plans?”
> 
> “No. No puppets. It’s your choice if you’re going to be in our way or not.” (C)
> 
> Agitated Zack ran a hand through his hair, mumbling “I offer thee this silent sacrifice.”
> 
> “What?” (A)
> 
> “I offer thee this silent sacrifice. It’s the last line of the fifth act of Loveless, it’s all I can remember.” (Z)
> 
> “The fifth act is lost.” (G)
> 
> “It’s in the final chamber in the caves beneath Banora, you need to gather up all the goddess materia to access it.” (Z)
> 
> “You think you can lure me away from my duty with Loveless?” (G)
> 
> “Is it working?” (Z)
> 
> “….” (G)
> 
> (2)  
> “Yeah, we escaped and were on the run. That’s how I died, Cloud made it.”
> 
> “Because of you.”
> 
> “And I only made it that far because of you.”
> 
> Cloud opened his mouth to protest but Angeal stoped him “Focus you two. What happened next?”


	11. Many hands make light work

They accomplished the coup with surprising ease. Sephiroth had a tactical mind, having trained for battlefield strategy since childhood. Instead of leading a mass desertion in Wutai of SOLDIERs and Troopers, he and Angeal reported to Shinra that they’d persuaded the rebel SOLDIERs to rejoin the company. Then, the war supposedly back on track, he, Angeal, and other troopers and SOLDIERs returned to Midgar with the rogues in tow. That a nine-year old boy came with the rogues, or that the squadron held a tenth-birthday party midflight for him, went unmentioned.

Sephiroth’s Gelnika hover carrier arrived first. He reported straight to the president, which no one questioned; it was a long standing procedure. No Turks were at that meeting, waiting on the roof instead to take charge of the two truants. A call, made through the president’s secretary, said that he wished to meet with Hojo and Hollander immediately. The urgency raised no alarm. President Shinra was not a man to keep waiting.

Around the same time the helicopter carrying the rogues arrived, Directors Scarlet, Heidegger, and Palmer were called to the president’s office. The Turks, who memorized names and faces as easily as they lied, caught on that things were not as they seemed when the two rebellious ‘SOLDIERs’ stepped out onto the helipad. But they didn’t realize the extent of the company’s crisis, focusing instead on the threat the two unknowns might cause. They swept them away to an interrogation room, but just as they reached it, the probable spies were called up to speak with the president. Sephiroth was on the line, and the Turks knew he was as capable of protecting the president as they were. By time they caught onto the steady spate of executions happening in the president’s richly appointed office, it was too late.

Deepground came after, a nasty surprise. Cloud’s best offer for not having known about it was that the group may have been buried after Meteor, crushed by the collapsing rubble of Midgar. He hoped that was it, that his counterpart in the alternate timeline never had to deal with them. He could only imagine the trouble the Tsviets would have been grown up. As it was, Deepground’s troops weren’t as strong as SOLDIER. Their strongest combatants were just kids. The fighting hadn’t lasted long.

That was seven month ago.

“How was the consultation?” Zack asked as Cloud entered their shared apartment. 

The place wasn’t big. Cloud placed the Fusion Sword next to the Buster Sword in the rack by the door before he answered, looking over the open counter that separated the kitchen from the combined living and dining area, two bedrooms, and bathroom beyond, and seeing Zack in tank top and shorts, doing squats.

“It was a board meeting, and boring.” Cloud wasn’t on the board. He wasn’t even part of Shinra, but Reeve liked to have him or Zack present for consultation. He couldn’t wait for things to change to the point where their information would be obsolete.

“Isn’t that why they’re called  _ bored _ meetings?” Zack came up from a squat and bopped him on the nose with a finger.

“Pffft.” Cloud rolled his eyes and batted him away. He looked around at the quiet apartment. “Where’s Denzel?” 

“Over at Angeal’s, playing with Nero and Weiss.”

Panic lanced through Cloud, but he squashed it. Denzel had been having a good effect on the preteen Tsviets, teaching them to be kids, not soldiers. Angeal was there, too, to intervene and keep things civil. Usually, Cloud or Zack went along, too.

“Are you sure Angeal can handle all three?”

“My younger self’s there, and half of SOLDIER, he’s fine.” Zack laughed at him fondly. “You mother hen.” He reached out and set his hands on Cloud’s hips. “So, anything going on I should know about, or can I whisk you away for a date?”

Cloud tilted his head, smirking. A date, huh? He put his hands on Zack’s chest, ran them up and down the black tanktop. Underneath it, his skin was warm and his heart rate elevated from the exercise. Cloud didn’t miss, though, that it beat a little faster still when Cloud touched him, or that his breath came faster.

Barret and Cid hadn’t used to call him a little shit for nothing. Instead of answering, yes, he was free, he started reporting on the meeting. “Reeve’s got some people from the Canyon coming out to talk about alternative energy sources.” Zack rolled his head back and groaned. Cloud’s smirk grew as he added, “And there’s an ambassador from Wutai scheduled to arrive next week.” 

Zack caught his hands. “Real diplomacy between Wutai and Shinra, there’s proof that things’ve changed. But basically, you’re saying you don’t have anything to do tonight, right? Your schedule hasn’t changed?”

Taking pity, Cloud nodded. “Right.” 

Instead of relaxing, Zack’s heart picked up again. “Then how ‘bout we take Skoll and Hati out for a ride?”

Skoll and Hati were their recently finished motorcycles. The designs were based off Fenrir, which he’d built in fits and starts, done and redone, over months. Skoll and Hati had been built much faster, and he’d put all the lessons he’d learned from Fenrir into their design.

He frowned, a bit suspicious of Zack’s odd behavior. He seemed nervous. “You’ve got something in mind?”

A short laugh. “Something,” Zack agreed.

“Do I get to know what it is?”

“Eventually.”

They sped along one of the looping highways out of the city together. The reactors were still going, staining the sky green, but Cloud was winning that battle. He thought he’d have them cold and shut down by the end of the year. Things weren't perfect in Midgar, but they were getting better, no doubt about it. Shinra’s chokehold was easing all over the world. Not everyone was happy about it, but Deepground’s retaliation had helped the coup more than it hurt. The secret force had been a prime example of why things needed to change, and much as Cloud loathed the thought, it had been effective from an optics standpoint. The tarnish of disloyalty and rebellion that might have stuck to the top SOLDIERs after their quiet, violent takeover was burnished away by the imagery of them saving the city from subterranean attackers.

Once they were outside the city, they opened the bikes’ throttles, letting them unwind. Gusts of wind whipped through his hair as he followed Zack west, away from the city. They tore across the wastes with dust billowing behind them until they hit the sparse grasslands near the coast. Lowering their speed, they cruised along the dunes, following the rise of the land up onto seaside cliffs. They had a good view of the glittering blue ocean from up here.

Zack rolled to a stop, the growl of Hati’s engine turning to a low purr before going quiet. Cloud pulled up beside him. He took a deep breath of the clean, salty air. It felt good to be out of Midgar. The ride and the vastness of the scenery eased tension he hadn’t realized he held. Zack dismounted, Cloud did the same, and they both stretched.

“It’s gorgeous out here. Go for a walk?” Zack offered, holding out his hand.

A walk along the beach, huh? He gave him a small smile, taking the offered hand. “When did you become such a romantic?” Their date nights were usually spent at arcades, trying a new restaurant Zack had found, or curled up at home with pizza and a movie. 

Zack scratched sheepishly at his cheek as they started to walk. “Well… variety is the spice of life, right?”

His heart rate had sped up again, Cloud noticed. Why was Zack so nervous today? Knocking shoulders with him, he quipped, “As long as you’re not gonna feed me chili peppers, variety isn’t so bad.”

They only walked for a few minutes before Zack pointed out a copse of wind battered pines, their trunks twisted and gnarled from years of withstanding storms. “Let’s head that way.” A flash of color caught his eye as they approached. Beneath the pines, a blue and purple plaid blanket was laid out with china bowls, plates, and stemless wine glasses. A bottle of wine in an ice bucket and a wicker basket large enough to fit a child sat to one side. A second blanket lay folded next to the basket, and unlit lanterns hung from the branches above.

Cloud stared at it, then gave his boyfriend a hard, questioning look. “Zack?”

Zack pulled him over to the set up. “Genesis helped me come up with the idea, believe it or not. Guy’s a true romantic. Kunsel’s the one who actually set it up for me. I texted him before we left the city. And Angeal cooked all the food, though I think Denzel helped out when he was over there yesterday.”

Cloud was kind of in awe at all the people Zack had roped into this. He sat and watched as Zack started to pull food from the basket. It started with a covered glass bowl filled with mixed berries, spinach, walnuts, and crumbled cheese. Zack handed it over and Cloud found a spot to set in.

Zack pulled out another bowl, opaque, and lifted its lid to check its contents. “Some kind of chilled soup, smells like corn and lobster.” He passed it over, along with a long, crusty breadloaf.

“You don’t know what Angeal packed?”

“Nope, just that it’ll be good. These two are sides.”

Cloud checked the new bowl and tinfoil-wrapped plate. Roasted potatoes with blue cheese, and couscous stuffed peppers. He could smell a litany of herbs and cheese mixed into the couscous. Zack passed over something wrapped in a cold bag. Oysters. Cloud’s lips twitched.  _ Thanks, Angeal. _

But that wasn’t the end of it. The food kept coming. Zack held up another temperature controlled dish. This time it was hot, and when they took a peek, the scent of boozy mushrooms, caramelized onions, and tender beef wafted out. After that came a large container with a note,  _ you’re going to have to arrange this yourself _ , stuck on top. Inside was a wooden board and many smaller containers. They opened each one and arranged the cheese board with  soft and firm cheese, prosciutto, salami, grapes, olives, apple slices, tangerines, cherries, almonds, walnuts, tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, rosemary crackers, honeycomb, and dark chocolate.

Cloud stared at everything. “I’m not sure how we’re supposed to eat all of this.”

“Eh, our metabolisms will take care of it. Besides we haven't even gotten to the best part - dessert.” At the bottom of the hamper were a pair of mason jars filled with alternating layers of dark chocolate cake and boozy stout chocolate cream. Zack held one aloft. “Alright! Let’s dig in.” He set down the jar, made himself comfortable on the blanket, and gestured to the feast. “Where do you want to start?”

Cloud stared around at the feast. “I guess with the cheese board? That’s supposed to be the appetizer, right?”

“Think so.” Zack reached over and snagged a tangerine slice, presenting it to him.

He felt the tip of his ears heat up at the implied offer but instead of scoffing and taking the fruit by hand, as his embarrassment insisted he do, he leaned forward, opening his mouth. “Dork,” he said before biting into the offering. The tangy flavor exploded in his mouth. Juice dripped down his chin. Zack wiped it away with his thumb.

“I love you so much.” Zack’s eyes were filled with so much warmth and want, Cloud ducked his head away from the intensity.

“I know.” He took the other half of the tangerine, by hand this time, before adding, “Feeling’s mutual.”

They spent the next two hours talking about little things. They steered clear of heavier topics like the past or Shinra and its politics, and focused on lighter things like a new video game and the prospect of racing their gold chocobos at the Costa del Sol track. They talked about Denzel’s school, and whether they should add delivery sevice alongside their mercenary work now that the bikes were finished.

Full almost to the point of being uncomfortable, Cloud sipped at the last of his dumbapple wine. “So are you going to tell me what’s the occasion?” This picnic was more elaborate than ‘a change of pace’ could explain.

“Well…” Zack set down his own glass, fidgeting with the blanket beneath them. “It’s been a year to the day since I asked if you’d date me, back in Gongaga. And, well… I’ve got another question now.”

Oh. A long drive, a walk along the sea cliffs, everyone helping out to give them a special evening, the quality and sheer amount of food. It finally all clicked in his head. Heat filled his face as Zack got up onto one knee, pulling a small box from a pocket. His face was painfully honest and sincere.

“Cloud, will you -”

“Yes.”

Zack blinked. “I didn’t even -”

Cloud cut him off. “I know what you’re going to say. The answer is yes.” His heart beat fast, and his skin almost burned with heat. He knew what Zack wanted to say, but he was too embarrassed to actually hear the words spoken.

“Can I at least -”

Cloud leaned forward and grabbed the back of Zack’s head, pulling him forward, kissing him roughly. When he pulled back both of them were flushed and breathing hard. He rested his forehead against Zack’s, staring into his eyes. His pupils were blown wide and flecks of violet showed between the artificial blue-green. “Yes. I want to marry you. I want to spend my life with you.”

He wasn’t great with words but it was easier to say them, letting them run out of his mouth, than to hear them.

“Oh,” Zack breathed before kissing him again.

Later they took the second blanket and sat wrapped up in it near the cliff's edge. Cloud sat between Zack’s legs and Zack had his chin resting on his shoulder. They were both looking at the ring on Cloud’s finger. It was a wide band of silver with an onyx inlay, a silhouetted pair of wolves running together.

“Please don’t lose that to any Zuus.”

Cloud laughed, remembering that adventure. “Promise.”

He leaned back into Zack, who was solid and warm behind him. The sun was setting over the ocean. Clouds of blazing red, pink, and orange reflected their colors onto the water. He’d lost Zack on a cliff, and got him back by the sea. Tonight, the two settings from their past blended and became a promise for their future. 

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Notes  
> Skoll and Hati are Fenrir’s sons in Norse mythology.
> 
> defragmentise (croixsouillees) I hope you enjoyed this story and that it was fun for you to read.


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